The Wanderer

Chapter Twenty-six

Doc shouted: “All out, everybody, for a stretch, and to answer Nature’s calls,” forcing a rudely jolly note into his hoarseness. “Wojtowicz, it looks like we’ve finally found the roadblock you deduced.”

The saucer students eagerly yet complainingly piled out into the cool, damp, high air. From almost behind them shone a strange greenish light from the setting sun — the party’s scientific consensus was that it was due to volcanic ash already crowding the stratosphere, though the Ramrod had ideas about planetary auras.

It was very clear they’d been through a lot in the day just ending and that the effects of last night’s lost sleep were showing up with a vengeance…

The yellow paint of the school bus and the white enamel of the panel truck behind it both showed flaring black streaks where they’d barely outraced brush fires. There was a heavy bandage around Clarence Dodd’s right hand, which the Little Man had badly burned holding up a tarpaulin to shield Ray Hanks, Ida and himself from the swooping, sweeping flames.

Hunter cursed as he almost fell out of the bus, stumbling over two spades carelessly left in the aisle after a wearisome two-hour stretch of digging sand and gravel to level a buckled stretch of Monica Mountainway enough for the two cars to get through. He shoved them under the seats with another curse.

Several of the wayfarers looked quite damp, and the black flame marks on bus and truck were runneled by the mighty rain which had come marching across the Santa Monica mountains in steel-gray waves out of the west, ten minutes after they had won their race with the fire. Its great dark curtain-clouds still obscured the east, though the west was clearing spottily.

They were almost twenty miles into the mountains and topping the next to the last ridge before the descent to the Valley, Vandenberg Three, and inland Route 101 leading north from Los Angeles toward Santa Barbara and San Francisco.

There were wet patches on the borrowed raincoat Doc had thrown over his shoulders, with the barest suggestion of a military cape, as he led the others forward, Rama Joan and Margo just behind him.

At this point the Mountainway traversed a half natural, half blasted step in a great slope of solid rock, which from a boulder-crowned summit ridge fifty yards up on their right ran down at an angle of thirty degrees and then, after the step holding the road, continued down at a slightly greater angle for a dozen yards or so and then plunged away precipitously, nothing visible beyond it but the side of another small mountain a half mile off.

The awesome gray rock-slope was patched with lichen, pale green, orange, smoky blue and black, and was scored and gouged with smooth-edged trenches and potholes, some of them holding boulders ranging up to panel-truck size.

One of the biggest of the latter lay squarely across the road, indenting it deeply. A lichen-free area just above showed the spot from which it had been dislodged, presumably by one of the quakes.

“Wow, I’ll say we’ve found the roadblock, Doc,” Wojtowicz called from behind. “She’s a bitch!”

Drawn up sideways just in front of the boulder was a top-down, four-passenger Corvette. Lipstick-red, freshly washed by the rain, it added a saucy touch to the sombre landscape. But there was no one in sight, and Doc’s cheery “Hello there!” was answered only by echoes.

Ida came hurrying up behind Doc, saying: “Mr. Brecht, Ray Hanks isn’t going to be able to take any more traveling today. We’ve propped his shoulders up a bit — it eases him, he says — but he’s in continual pain and has a two-degree fever.”

Doc rounded the red hood, then all of a sudden stopped dead and reared up and back as if invisible grapples had lifted him eight inches by the shoulders. He turned on those behind him a face that looked greener than the sunlight and swept out an arm, saying, “Stay where you are. Don’t anybody come any closer.” He whipped off his raincoat and drew it across something lying just beyond the car.

With a thin, wavery moan Ida quietly collapsed on the asphaltoid.

Then Doc turned to them again, leaning on the car for support and brushing a trembling hand across his forehead, and said in jerky rushes, with difficulty, as if he were fighting down an impulse to retch: “It’s a young woman. She didn’t die naturally. She’d been stripped and tortured. Remember, way back, the Black Dahlia case? It’s like that.”

Margo was half doubled over with nausea herself. She had just glimpsed, before the pale raincoat covered it, the bloodless mask of a face with cheeks slashed so that the mouth seemed to stretch from ear to ear.

Rama Joan, pressing Ann’s head to her waist, but her body on tiptoe as she peered ahead, called: “There are two sedans on the other side of the rock. I don’t see anyone in them.”

The Little Man moved forward behind her.

“Where’s your gun, Doddsy?” Doc demanded of him.

“Why, I can’t handle it with this hand,” the other retorted. “It’s all I can do to jot notes in my journal. I left it in the truck.”

“I got mine, Doc,” Wojtowicz called. He stumbled as he hurried forward through the press, but caught himself by driving the gun’s butt against the asphaltoid. As he recovered balance he was holding it for a moment by the muzzle, like a pilgrim’s staff.

At the same moment a voice from close by called out very sharply the trite words: “Don’t move. We’ve got you all covered. Don’t move a finger, anybody, or you’ll be shot.”

A man had stepped out from behind a boulder just above the road, and two more men from another just below it. These two leveled rifles at Wojtowicz, the other slowly wagged back and forth, only an inch or so either way, the muzzles of two revolvers. The head of each of the men was entirely covered with a bright red silk mask with large eyeholes. The man above the road had a jauntily collegiate black felt hat pulled down over the top of his, and he was slim and nattily dressed, but for all that he gave the impression of wiry, jigging age rather than of real youth.

Now he came stepping down, rather quickly and very sure-footedly. His eyes twitched as ceaselessly across the knot of travelers as did the muzzles of his two revolvers.

“That was a happy guess about the Black Dahlia,” he said rapidly but very clearly, enunciating every word with a finicky precision. “She was the masterpiece of my youth. This time everything will go much more pleasantly — and a chance of survival for each of you — if the man with the gun will just let go of it now.” Wojtowicz’s hand unclasped, and the gun teetered oddly for a second before starting to fall. “And if all the men will separate themselves from the women, moving back and a little downhill, so—”

Rock chips spattered from a point on the road-blocking boulder five feet to the side of the black-hatted, red-masked man. Almost simultaneously there was a zing-spat-zing, and immediately the crack of a rifle behind them. Ray Hanks had managed to get off a shot from his cot in the truck.

Wojtowicz snatched up his fallen gun and shot from the hip at the two masked men with rifles. Almost at once they both fired, and Wojtowicz fell.

By that time Margo had the gray pistol out of her jacket and was pointing it at Black Hat and squeezing the trigger. He slammed flat back against the boulder with a crunch, his hands thrown out like a man crucified, and his revolvers shot out of his hands to either side. The boulder rocked, just a fraction.

Someone was screaming fiercely, exultantly.

Wojtowicz shot from the ground, the men with the rifles fired again, then Margo had turned the pistol on them, and they went sailing backward, cartwheeling and somersaulting, one of them clipping a boulder, their rifles whirling along separately, until they were a dozen yards beyond the cliffs edge and had dropped out of sight.

Black Hat fell slowly forward from the boulder, revealing a red stain where his head had rested against it. Margo ran toward him, pointing the pistol at him, and simply swept him across the downward slope and off the cliff after his henchmen, three small boulders with him.

Doc, nearest to Margo’s line of fire, waltzed around with arm outstretched, as if doing a dance, took three long steps down the slope, and managed to check himself with his feet against a rock ridge three inches high.

Hunter ran to Margo, grabbed the gray pistol with one hand and pulled her finger off the trigger with the other, shouting: “It’s only me!” in her face.

Only then did she stop screaming her killer’s scream to gasp to him a fiendishly grinning, “Uh-huh.”

The Ramrod ran forward toward Ida.

Harry McHeath knelt by Wojtowicz, who was saying: “Wow, oh wow!” Then: “Hell, kid, I was planning on dropping after the first shot, anyhow. They just creased my shoulder — I think. Better we look.”

Doc came loping up to Margo and Hunter, demanding: “My God, what is that gun? I got an arm in the beam edge, and it was like I was throwing the hammer and forgot to let go of it.”

Margo said rapidly to Hunter: “You don’t have to worry about it being out of power. It’s still half-charged — see, the violet line, right there.”

Doc said: “Let me—” and then suddenly snapped erect and quickly stared around him. “McHeath,” he shouted, “bring me Wojtowicz’s gun! Rama Joan, look after Wojtowicz. Hixon, get Hanks’ gun — if that hero cares to give it up. Ross, give Margo back her pistol. She knows how to use it. Margo, you and I are going to reconnoiter this area until we’re sure there’s no more vermin. Get on my left hand and shoot anything with a gun that isn’t one of us, but watch how you swing that beam.”

Margo, who had gone very pale, started to grin again and placed herself by Doc as directed, assuming a wary half-crouch. Wanda, coming up to help the Ramrod revive Ida, took one look at Margo and shrank away from her.

The Little Man said thoughtfully: “I really think it was the Black Dahlia killer, but now we’l probably never know what he looked like. Why, we might even have recognized him.”

Wojtowicz, wincing as Rama Joan ripped his bloody shirt off his shoulder with her teeth, snarled up at Doddsy: “Oh, nuts!”

Rama Joan pushed blood off her lips with her tongue and said quietly: “Fetch your first-aid kit, Mr. Dodd.”

Doc took the gun McHeath offered him, threw a fresh cartridge into the chamber and started up the slope, saying to Margo: “Come on, while there’s still light. We’ve got to secure our camp site.”

Barbara Katz suppressed a wince as the big policeman shoved his head and flashlight through the back window on her side of the sedan and demanded loudly but unexcitedly: “You niggers steal this car?”

She began to talk rapidly, in the role of secretary-companion to Knolls Kelsey Kettering III, meanwhile sliding her hand back and forth on the window frame to draw the policeman’s attention to the hundred-dollar bill in it, but he only went on shining his flashlight in their faces.

When it stabbed at KKK Barbara realized with a shock that the wrinkle-meshed face did look rather like that of an old darkie. And he had turned almost stuporous again — the heat had been too much for him. But then the little pale blue eyes opened and a cracked but arrogant voice commanded: “Stop shining that thing in my face, you blue-coated idiot!”

This seemed to satisfy the policeman, for he switched off his flash, and Barbara felt the bill drawn smoothly from under her fingers. He took his head out of the window and said good-humoredly: “O.K., I guess you can go on now. But tell me one thing, what do you folks think you’re running away from? Most say high tides, but there’s no hurricane. A couple cars talked about something coming from Cuba. You’re all running like rabbits. It doesn’t make sense.”

Barbara stuck her head out of the window. “It is the tides,” she insisted. “The new planet is making them.” She looked back east down the road they’d just traveled to where the Wanderer was rising all purple with a yellow monster-shape on it. The glittering spindle of the deformed moon, one end of the spindle foreshortened by the curve of its orbit, might be a sack the monster was carrying.

“Oh, that,” the policeman said, his big face grinning. “That’s something way off in the heavens. It doesn’t matter. I’m talking about things on Earth.”

“But that’s the moon breaking up around it,” she argued.

“Wrong shape for the moon,” he pointed out to her patiently. “The moon’s somewhere else.”

“But the new planet is making high tides,” she pleaded with him. “The first tide wasn’t so bad, but they’ll get higher. Florida’s not more than three hundred feet high anywhere. They may wash straight over it.”

He spread his hands, as if to invoke the testimony of the balmy night fragrant with orange blossoms, and chuckled tolerantly.

Barbara said: “I’m trying to warn you. That planet’s a doom-sign.” He continued to chuckle.

She felt herself seethe with sudden anger. “Well, if nothing that matters is happening,” she demanded, “why are you stopping all cars?”

The grin vanished. “We’re keeping order in Citrus Center,” he said harshly, moving toward the next car in line. “Tell your boy to drive on before I change my mind. Your boss ought to know better than to let his nigger girl talk for him. You college-educated niggers are the worst. They try to teach you science, but you get it all mixed up with your crazy African superstitions.”

They drove north in silence while the Wanderer slowly climbed, and the moon-spindle crawled across it, and the monster changed to a big purple D.

Knolls Kelsey Kettering III began to breathe gaspingly. Hester said: “We got to find him a bed. He got to stretch out.”

Benjy slowed to read a sign. “You are leaving Glades and entering Highlands County.” Suddenly he laughed whoopingly. “That high lands sure sound good!”

But would they be high enough? Barbara wondered.

Richard Hillary woke shivering and aching. He’d pushed aside in his sleep the straw covering him. And through the straw under him, crushed flatly, had mounted the chill of the ground — the chill of the Chiltern Hills, his mind, half sleep-locked, alliterated it. Overhead the strange planet flared, revolved back to its dismal D again. He recalled some of the other faces it had shown — equally ugly faces, looking more like signs or a psychologist’s toys than natural formations — one a bloat-centered X; another, a big yellow bull’s eye in a purple target. Still, it seemed to bulk out more like a true globe how, less like a circular flat signboard. And there was a beauty akin to that of Brancusi’s “Bird in Space” in its curving white half-ring. Could that last conceivably be the moon, as a fellow-trudger had assured him? Surely not. Yet the moon had traveled the sky all last night and where else was the moon now?

He sat up quietly, hugging himself for warmth, rebuttoning his coat collar and turning up the inadequate flap. The straw stack from which he’d taken his bedding was all gone now, and where he’d had at most a dozen comrades when he’d laid down some two hours ago, there were now scores of low straw mounds, each covering one or more sleepers. How quietly they had come — hushing each other, perhaps, as they scooped up and hugged their straw; late arrivers at a sleeping hostel. He envied those huddled in pairs their shared warmth, and he remembered very wistfully the Young Girl of Devizes who had seemed at the time so stupid and coarse. He remembered her sausage-and-mashed, too.

He looked toward the farmhouse where he’d bought a small bowl of soup last night and paid for his straw. Its lights were still on, but the windows were irregularly obscured. He realized with mild amazement that this was because of the people outside crowded together against its walls like bees for warmth. Surely many of the late-comers must have gone hungry; the ready food would be gone like the straw. Or perhaps the farmer’s wife would be baking? He sniffed, but got only a briny smell. Had she opened a barrel of salt beef? But now his mind was wandering foolishly, he told himself.

Despite the crowd of new sleepers, there seemed to be no more people coming. And the road beyond the gate, which had been loud with traffic when he’d gone to sleep, was quiet and empty.

He stood up and looked east. The valley through which he’d just trudged was now full of dark silvery mist, fingers of it stretching around the hill on which he was now, pushing up each grassy gully.

The mist had a remarkably flat top, gleaming like gun-metal.

He saw two lights, red and green, moving across it mysteriously, close together.

He realized that they were the lights of a boat and that the mist was solid, still water.

The stand of the high tide.