The canyon, he knew by now, was keyhole-shaped, widening to a two-hundred-yard arc at the rear, and constricting to a narrow bottleneck at the entrance, over which Forrest held sway from his perch. Whatever else you said about him, Gideon thought, you had to admit he knew how to pick his canyons.
The plan, then, was to continue on this arc along the foot of the cliffs, until he had enough of a turning radius available to head back toward the entrance.
And through it, with any luck.
“Uh!” The sound was wrung from him as the right front wheel jounced over a pile of stones and dropped into a foot-deep hollow. The van tipped over so far that the open driver’s door slammed shut on its own. Metal screeched against rock as the undercarriage bottomed, but somehow the van scrabbled its way out. Gideon tasted blood where he’d bitten the inside of his cheek.
But they were still moving.
“Get ready now,” he called back, wrestling the wheel, “I’ve got enough room to make the turn. I’m just going to get it pointed toward the opening, step on the gas, and pray.”
“Amen,” Julie said.
They were about a hundred yards from the entrance; they would be in Forrest’s sights the whole time, head-on, with Gideon himself in plain view. But what else was there to do? They couldn’t stay in the canyon, and if they tried leaving the van and scaling the walls a leisurely Forrest could pick them off in the bright sunlight like moving targets in a carnival shooting gallery. Ping, they’d go, and fall over like growling bears or quacking ducks.
And Forrest would get the prize.
Gideon swung hard toward the right, put just a little more pressure on the gas pedal, and clutched the jerking wheel to keep the van headed straight for the opening. With all the rolling, lurching, and jolting that was going on without any help from him, he didn’t see any need to worry about evasive tactics.
The first shot was fired as he came full around, facing the entrance. There was an inconsequential snick from the front of the vehicle just below the window and a seemingly simultaneous thud as the bullet struck the floor on the passenger side, about three feet from Gideon’s right leg.
Why, those things can go right through metal, Gideon thought indignantly. Like butter. What the hell, it hardly seemed fair. On the other hand, that was the fourth shot Forrest had taken at them now, and they were still in one piece. Crack, there was another; he saw the dust spatter twenty feet in front of the van. Was Forrest panicking, getting less accurate rather than more? He hunched down lower on the seat and pressed as hard as he dared on the pedal. Seventy yards to go… sixty-five… He began to let himself think about Life After the Canyon.
He never heard the next shot strike, didn’t really see it strike. One second he was trying to decide whether or not he could risk taking the van over the rocks rearing up in their path. The next second the windshield was honeycombed by a thousand glittering little fissures that turned the landscape into a kaleidoscope. Immediately the steering wheel fought him harder, pulling at his arms as if it knew that he was blind, that it had the upper hand now.
“Hang on!” he yelled or tried to yell, pawing with his foot for the brake, but a scrunching shock sent him helplessly up in the air still clinging to the wheel, like a kid bounced off a seesaw and hanging on to the handle for dear life. Then, for a breath-stopping moment the entire van was airborne, coming down heavily on its rear wheels and careening on, slowed now but tilted wildly to the right, on two wheels; so much so that Gideon, flung like a bundle of laundry into the passenger seat corner, saw only sky through the driver’s window on the other side.
We’re tipping over, he thought. “Brace yourself!” he called. “We’re-”
And over they went, the van falling sluggishly onto its right side and then, slowly, surprisingly, continuing to roll, as if someone were pushing it down a hill. For an impossibly long moment it hung, balanced and seemingly struggling, before it tumbled onto its top with a terminal, metal-crumping whomp that smashed the remaining windows, popped the crackled windshield out of its mounting, and crumpled the left rear half of the roof like so much tinfoil.
Gideon ended up on his back on the ceiling along with everything else that was loose, including Julie, who was sprawled beside him under a welter of seat cushions, clothes and other junk.
He reached instinctively for her with his hand. “Julie, are you okay?” Years of dirt and sand that had been tramped into the van fell onto their faces like dry rain.
“Ugh. Yes. Phooey.” She was spitting dust. “Nothing that a few weeks in traction won’t fix. What about you?”
“Yes, fine.”
Well, pretty much. The van had tipped slowly enough to let him prop himself against the roof and the back of the front seat before it had turned completely over, but the tire iron- he’d brought it up front with him-had gouged him in the thigh, which had hurt a little, and somewhere along the way he had bitten his cheek again in the same spot, which had hurt like hell but wasn’t anything serious. He realized abruptly that the engine was still running and quickly reached down- reached up, rather-to switch off the ignition, then cautiously peeked through a corner of the space where the windshield had been to check their bearings.
They were in a kind of nook or cul-de-sac, a mini-box canyon off the main box canyon. Apparently the van had swerved into it, then flipped when it rode up onto the sloping talus at the foot of the cliffs, rolling into the troughlike center of the little bay. A good thing too; only twenty or thirty feet ahead of them-all around them, in fact-were truck-sized boulders that had fallen from above, a collision with any one of which would surely have resulted in more to complain about than a bitten cheek.
There was another good thing: the hollow from which Forrest had been firing was out of sight around a spur of rock, and if they couldn’t see where he was, then he couldn’t see where they were either. That, Gideon assured himself, was what the laws of geometrical optics said, and who was he to question the laws of geometrical optics?
Not only that, but geography was cooperating too. They were on the same side that Forrest was on; behind him, so to speak. The perpendicular spur that thrust out from the cliff to create their little bay was a promontory of the same massive organ-pipe formation in one of whose upper hollows Forrest had been crouching to fire. But that was at the other end of it, and to get from there to here, to a place where he could see them again, Forrest would have to go the long way around, behind the sinuous outcropping, because on the canyon side it reared up, sheer and columnar, with no visible path or ledge around it.
The problem for Forrest would be that he had no way of knowing that the van had turned over, since he couldn’t see the bay. As far as he knew, it could come rattling back out at any moment, spewing nuts and bolts like a cartoon car and heading full-tilt for the entrance again. And if he was stuck behind the outcropping when it did, there would be nothing to stop their getting through. On the other hand, he could hardly keep his position at the canyon’s mouth because Gideon and Julie might already be scrambling up the bay’s back wall and out of his grasp.
In other words, Forrest Freeman had himself a predicament. And if Forrest Freeman’s past behavior was any indication, what he would do would be to worry for a while before doing anything else. That meant that they ought to have seven or eight minutes before he showed up above them with his rifle; five minutes while he dithered and another two or three while he worked his way around the promontory, if that was what he decided to do.
Gideon turned back to Julie. “Let’s get out of this thing. We’ll stand a lot better chance out there-there are caves and outcroppings all over the place-than we will waiting in here for him to come pick us off.”
“I won’t argue with that,” she said. “I think the front window’s the easiest way out. Go ahead, I’ll follow you.”