Last Call (Last Call 1)

The man dived forward across the seat, and his legs flexed and then stood straight out of the car for a moment as he thrashed and huffed and grunted inside; after a moment he went limp, and through tear-blurred eyes Ozzie looked up and down the empty highway.

The bang, muffled inside the car, had hardly been more than a loud snap, and Ozzie knew the wind had carried it away unheard.

He thought about folding the dead man's legs in under the steering wheel. And then he thought about retrieving his cane from under the body.

At last he just leaned in over the man's broad back, resolutely looking at the holster and not at the blood, hooked out the revolver, and turned away to limp, unaided, across the highway and into the perilous chapel in the wasteland.

CHAPTER 32: Get In Close

Like the floor of the ruined Colosseum, the surface across which Crane and Susan walked was hatched with trenches, as if corridors in some vast cellar had collapsed long ago. Walking in the trenches kept the wind-blown sand out of their eyes, though it did nothing to protect them from the weight of the sun.

Every time the two of them climbed a sand slope back up to floor level, Crane could see that the far wall had drawn a little closer.

The wound in his thigh, which had been healing, had begun to bleed again, making a black, shiny spot on his jeans.

At last he climbed up and saw only flat sand between himself and the wall, and he could see an ancient architectural gap in it, blocked now by a tumble weed.

Crane turned to look back and see if he could gauge how far they'd come, but a thing hanging on one of the nearest cacti made him jump and swear.

It was a dried human body, hung upside down. One ankle was tied to the top of the cactus, and the other leg, though obviously as stiff as driftwood now, had once bent at the knee under gravity and was now bent that way forever. Desiccation had given the face an expression of composure.

And then the eyes opened, their whites glaring against the brown leather of the face, and Crane screamed and scrambled back away from the autistic malice that shone in the bright black pupils.

From behind, Susan touched Crane's arm. "You remember him. Come on and meet the others."

Numbly Crane let her turn him toward the doorway.

The tumble weed that blocked it was as big as a stove, and even as he focused his eye on it, the round dry bush exploded into twigs; a flat, hollow boom shook the super-heated air, and Crane realized that somebody had fired a shotgun at the tumble weed.

He stopped walking and stared at the blown-open bush.

When he heard the two harsh, metallic lisps of the shotgun being re-chambered, he turned around.

A few yards behind him the fat man was stepping carefully over the uneven ground, wearing a business suit and carrying a shotgun slung under his arm, pointed at the ground. Crane was vaguely glad that the fat man wasn't appearing as the warty sphere today. A few steps further back was another man, on whom Crane couldn't get his false eye to focus. Apparently they had been pacing Crane and Susan in one of the parallel trenches.

Susan's bony fingers were still on Crane's arm. "Come on," she said. "Meet me."

Crane let her push him through the broken stone doorway. He took a few steps out across the floor of the next wide, roofless expanse of sand, and then he turned and looked back at her.

His head was suddenly singing with shock, but he just stepped back.

Susan had apparently taken off all her clothes since the last time he had focused his eye on her. If he had noticed it, he would have warned her about what would happen, what had in fact happened—she had dried out completely, and her nakedness was horrible now.

She was a skeleton covered tight with thin, sun-shrunken leather; her breasts were empty flaps, and her groin was a hole torn open in a sawdust-stuffed doll; her eyes and mouth were pulled so wide open that she couldn't shut them, and steam was wafting out of the holes as her tongue and eyeballs withered away.

But she was smiling, and with a bony brown foot she kicked a big puffball loose from its mooring in the sand, and then she strode long-legged to another and kicked it loose, too.

There were a lot of the ball things poking up out of the sand, he noticed now, and when he made his eye focus on them, he saw that they were the blinking, grimacing heads of people buried up to their necks in the desert. There were arms sticking up, too, holding fanned-out playing cards.

Susan was bounding lightly from place to place, waving her long, thin brown arms over her head like a monkey, pausing before each next leap only long enough to kick another head loose from the stem of its neck.

The senile chorus of the wind in the broken stones was louder here, and Crane was suddenly desperate for a drink.