Panic! Read online

  and he feels himself falling, blackness spinning all around him, dizzying within and without, his head strikes something, his arm strikes something, he is falling off the rock, and there is a solid jarring, an explosion of fresh pain that is still not as great as that in the core of his belly and the blackness becomes redness, flashing, pulsating, dissolves to blackness again and his hands flutter ineffectually at his stomach, the steel is gone now but the blood is there and the hole, the hole

  dying, I’m dying, and he did it with a spear, a spear, what kind of thing is that, a goddamn spear, what kind of way is that to play the game ...

  Fifteen

  Lennox had flung himself to the sand after releasing the steel splinter, looking up, preparing to roll toward a thick wooden tie if the hurtling shaft missed; but then he saw it strike flesh, saw the killer reel and stagger, the one gun drop, saw him topple off the rock into the sand at its base—and he allowed his body to go limp and his head to drop forward into the crook of his arms. He lay that way for a moment, finally lifted his head, and the fat one was still lying there in the sand, not moving. Lennox thought giddily: He shot at me point-blank, three or four times at point-blank range, and he missed every time and I had one primitive chance and I didn’t miss, maybe there is a God after all ...

  And then Jana was there, kneeling in the sand beside him, holding his head, pressing his face between her breasts, trying to cry but finding no moisture for her tears. “I saw it all, I saw it, oh Jack, oh God, Jack, are you ... ?”

  “No,” he said, “no, I’m all right.”

  A sobbing, almost hysterical laugh—a release of the spiraled tension inside her—spilled from Jana’s throat. “It’s over,” she said, “we’re all right, we’re all right.”

  He felt tired, he felt incredibly tired. Hunger clawed just under his breastbone, and every inch of his body ached hellishly. He wanted to lie there and sleep, he wanted to lie with his head against Jana’s warm breast and sleep for days, for weeks. His mind seemed to have gone blank, incapable in that moment of sustaining thought, and it was good that way, for just a little while; all the thinking that had to be done had already been done before this final confrontation—all the examining and understanding—and there was no need for introspection now. They had survived, they had found one another and they had found a future, and there was simply nothing else to think about in this moment.

  “Jack,” Jana said, “Jack, he’s moving up there, he’s still alive.” There was a kind of sickness in her voice—but nothing more.

  She released his head, and Lennox stared at the crumpled form lying a few feet away, saw it twitching in the sand. He got painfully to his knees, finally onto the enervated spikes that were his legs, and walked there cautiously, stopping to pick up a heavy rock on the way. But there was no need for caution; blood pumped in diminishing geysers from the wound in the fat man’s round, soft stomach, and clawed fingers clutched uselessly at the earth. The eyes were open, but Lennox had the feeling that they were sightless, already sightless.

  He felt no more hatred, he felt no emotion of any kind toward this dying lump of flesh. Rattling, liquid sounds began in the convulsing throat, the split lips opened, moved, as if trying to form words. He knows I’m standing here, Lennox thought, he knows I’m looking at him, and blood dribbled out at the corners of the small, broken mouth as it tried again to make intelligible sounds.

  Lennox knelt, not knowing exactly why he knelt, and leaned close to the mottled, contorted face. Blood filled the mouth now, thick and red, overflowing, and Lennox felt nausea ascend in the pit of his stomach, intensifying the hunger pain there. He started to rise, to turn away, and then the rattling sounds became words, almost inaudible and yet very clear, forced through the bright blood along with a final, spasmodic exhalation—words that for Lennox had no meaning at all.

  The words: “Fuck the winners.”

  They climbed out of the arroyo at the same point at which they had entered it, and just as they emerged, there came from the west the high-pitched scream of sirens. They stood on the flatland, and seconds later three cars came very fast along the rutted trail—two black-and-white county cruisers and an unmarked black hardtop. One of the cruisers slowed and stopped near the two bodies at the foot of the slope, and the other two machines continued along the ruts.

  A chattering, whirring sound reached their ears, coming from the sky to the east, and when they looked up they saw a dark shape—a helicopter—flying just to the near side of the golden rim of the sun, like an insect moving away from a naked light bulb. They looked back to the wheel ruts as the cruiser and the black hardtop drew abreast of them, came to shuddering halts one behind the other. Doors were flung open, and men burst out and began to run toward them across the rocky flatland.

  The helicopter was very close now, the sun reflecting off the transparent glass bubble beneath its rotors, coming directly overhead. The hot turbulence generated by its spinning blades was somehow soothing on Jana’s face, billowing her dust-grimed hair, the tattered remains of her clothing. It really is over, she thought with a kind of wonder, it’s finally over. And then her eyes turned to Lennox and she thought: No, it’s just beginning.

  He took her hand, held it tightly, and they started toward the approaching men.

  Walking now.

  Walking together.