A Time of Predators

He couldn’t do it. Curt went down gingerly on his belly, stretched an arm down, was able to close his fingers around Champ’s wrist. “Try to chin yourself,” Curt began. “Try to pull up where I can get—”

Champ’s fingers straightened, his full weight, held only by Curt’s grip, fell free and slammed Curt clown against the rough stone ledge.

Curt yelled and realized that the weight was gone. His own hand had popped open under that scourge of pain.

Champ fell backward, shoulders hunched, legs windmilling above his head, right hand clawing empty air. He made no outcry. His heavy body plummeted through the undergrowth and smashed on the jagged unseen rocks at the base of the cliff with a sickening thud.

Silence. Mutter of distant surf.

Curt struggled to his feet, leaned against the rock, face ashen. Predators? Well, he had learned something about himself then. Not in cold blood could he do it. His victory was bitter in his thoughts. As for the others...

There were no preliminary whimperings — just sudden open-throated shrieks of pain, like the ululating wails of mating panthers. Curt jerked his head around, stared horror-stricken into the shadows below. After a fall like that, the man couldn’t live, couldn’t...

Once in the desert they had been pinned down for two days by enemy air and a man in a perimeter position had been hit and had yelled for nine hours without pause, so that three men were killed trying to get to him and they finally just had left him there, screaming until he died...

Curt had to find a way down. Had to do something. But... no way down. Not for a man with broken ribs. Up, then? Impossible. One way: work obliquely along the face of the cliff toward the edge of the ravine, try to find a way off the cliff face and into the trees. Then down the gravel drive to the man dying below him.

Curt started to move, then paused. His eyes swept the clearing below, and a chill of realization ran through him. The others had not appeared! The pale glow of a kerosene lamp shone against the curtained windows he could see from there. They must have heard the body falling; they must be hearing the screams. But none of them had emerged. Even if they thought it was Curt, not their buddy Champ...

Curt shuddered again; that callous disregard was the worst thing they had done. Then he started edging his way painfully along.

Chapter 30

They were in the living room when the heavy body smashed down through the foliage to stop with an abrupt thud on the rocks. Rick came to his feet with the darkly blued .32 Colt automatic clutched in his right hand, his face very pale.

“What was that?” he demanded in a hoarse whisper.

Heavy also was on his feet, rosy-cheeked face beaming. “Champ got him!” he exclaimed happily. “Champ knocked him off the cliff!”

Julio was halfway to the kitchen door when Rick called him back in a flat, almost deadly voice. “If that was Halstead falling, we’ll know when Champ comes back.”

“But what if it was Champ? What if—”

“Then we can do nothing for him anyway.”

To hell with that, thought Julio. Ever since the rape of Debbie, he seemed to have been waking by painful degrees from some sort of bad dream which had begun last April with the attack on Rockwell. A dream in which he did not what he wished, but what seemed dictated by something outside himself. Well, he was through following Rick’s lead.

He started again for the door, but behind him the safety clicked off. He looked back: the pistol was trained on him, and the look in Rick’s eyes, almost a madness, brought him back to his chair.

Then the screams started.

Julio’s lips drew back and his eyes started from his face as if he were being throttled. “That’s Champ’s voice! He is hurt, he—”

“It might be a trick.”

The gun didn’t waver. Julio sat still. Fifteen minutes passed, while the cries continued. Heavy sat on the couch like a fat white grub, eating a corned beef sandwich; Rick sat in the easy chair beside the cold potbellied stove, with his right leg over the arm of the chair so he could rest the butt of the .32 on his knee.

“Rick, please, listen to that... that noise. Champ—”

“Shut up.”

The cries continued for the next hour intermittently, as if the injured man were undergoing surgery without anesthesia. Heavy, who had made a whole loaf of bread into cheese and corned beef sandwiches before the lights had gone out, was very steadily and surely eating his way to the bottom of the stack.

Julio spoke to him suddenly. “Will you come with me? I can’t stand that sound any more.”