She swigged from her canteen.
‘Hancock wants to drag the bomb to the aim point. Happy to let him plot and scheme. He isn’t going anywhere. His head wound smells bad. Septicaemia. Hate to say it, but if he doesn’t get help soon, he’ll die.
‘Noble is holding up well. Sure, he’s feeling the pressure. Lost it for a while. Thought he could hear choppers. But he’s in good physical shape. He intends to walk out of here tonight. Take some water, some food. Our lives are in his hands.
‘Maybe one day someone will find this recording and play it back. A messed-up flygirl recounting her dying days.
‘This is a pitiless place. We’re parched, exhausted, pretty much at the end of the line. Looks like I got to make some hard decisions.
‘Just remember: you got no right to judge.’
She reached forward and pressed Off.
29
Trenchman and Akingbola sprinted across the sand. They scrambled up dunes, tumbled down gradients in a cascade of dust. Exhausted. Dehydrated. Cooked by merciless sun.
They looked around as they ran, regarded the featureless sandscape with terror.
Akingbola stumbled and fell to his knees. He panted with fatigue. Trenchman grabbed his arm and pulled him to his feet.
‘Don’t stop. For God’s sake keep moving.’
‘I can’t.’
Trenchman cuffed him round the head.
‘Move your ass.’
They stumbled onwards. The limestone peaks of the Panamint Range emerged from the heat haze up ahead, ghost-crags taking solid form.
‘There,’ pointed Trenchman. The nearest outcrop was half a mile away. ‘Firm ground.’
They sprinted, fast as they could, burned last reserves of strength as they made for the rocks.
They reached boulders projecting from the sand. Jumped, gripped, hauled themselves up onto sun-baked rock. They climbed higher, anxious to be away from the dunes. They turned, sat and looked back at the silicone ocean.
Wordless exhaustion.
Trenchman looked around. He pointed to an overhang.
‘Shade,’ he croaked.
They crawled on hands and knees, dragged themselves to shadow.
Akingbola cracked a Coke, sucked froth, and shared the can.
Ochre rocks. Oxidised iron salts stained boulders the colour of rust.
‘I’d say we were moderately fucked.’
‘I will not allow fortune to pass sentence on myself,’ said Trenchman.
‘Pershing?’
‘Seneca.’
‘Want to rest here?’ asked Akingbola. ‘Sleep out the day?’
Trenchman shook his head.
‘We ought to get further from the desert. A mile at least. Then we can rest. Take turns to keep watch.’
They slowly got to their feet and began to haul themselves upwards. One plateau after another. Rocks marbled with mica, manganese and iron salts. Pinks, yellows and purples. They scrabbled for hand-holds. They helped each other climb ledge to ledge.
‘Watch out for Diamondbacks.’
They reached a pinnacle. Trenchman threw his head back and basked in a gentle breeze.
‘Man, that’s sweet.’
Akingbola checked out the view.
‘Dude. Better take a look at this.’
A steep gradient leading down to dunes. They hadn’t reached the mountains. They were sitting on an island of rock. Another hundred yards of desert before they reached the comparative safety of the Panamint Range.
‘A short sprint,’ said Akingbola.
‘Yeah.’
‘Cross it in a few seconds.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Can’t imagine any those infected fucks followed us all the way out here. Crazy to think they’d be lurking in the dust like freakin’ piranhas.’
Trenchman nodded.
‘We ought to rest a moment, get our strength back. Then make the run.’
They sat a while and relished the parched desert breeze.
Trenchman looked up at the sky.
‘I’ve been trying to make sense of it. Infected burrowing beneath the sand. Must be hiding from the sun. I mean, lizards and snakes burrow to escape the desert heat, right? Maybe these bastards are trying to prolong their lives. Wouldn’t last a day or two in the open. Their bodies would putrefy, their brains would cook in their skulls. So they head below ground.’
‘Hard to credit them with that kind of intelligence.’
‘Maybe the virus is thinking on their behalf. Maybe it has a game plan.’
Akingbola shook his head.
‘It’s a disease, no better than gonorrhoea. It doesn’t follow any grand strategy.’
They stood and stretched, shook out tired limbs.
‘Ready?’
‘Yeah. Fuck it.’
Akingbola got fifty yards before an emaciated hand erupted from the sand, gripped his leg and began to haul him below ground.
‘It’s got me. It’s fucking got me.’
Trenchman doubled back. He fired into the sand. He grabbed Akingbola’s arms and pulled.
Akingbola’s leg jerked free, minus a boot. He got to his feet. He slapped Trenchman on the back:
‘Go. Just go.’
Trenchman ran. He covered the last fifty yards tensed like a sprint across a minefield: each footfall a coin-flip with death.
He headed for a vertiginous cliff face, the point where jagged limestone crags rose from the desert dust.
He covered the last few feet convinced he would, at any moment, be snatched beneath the sand.
He gripped a boulder, hauled himself up onto its grit-dusted surface. He scrambled one-eighty, intending to offer Akingbola a hand, but the guy wasn’t there. He was a hundred yards away, sitting on the outcrop they just fled.
Trenchman cupped his hands.
‘What the hell are you doing?’
Akingbola pointed to his torn and bloodied pant leg.
‘I got bit,’ he shouted.
Trenchman sat head in hands. Tired, defeated.
‘Sorry I dragged you out here. Didn’t have the right.’
‘No sweat,’ shouted Akingbola. ‘It’s a fucked-up world. Nobody’s fault. Just the way it is.’
They sat, looking at each other, separated by a hundred yards of sand.
‘You better get going,’ shouted Akingbola. He gestured to the rock face. ‘Sunset. You don’t want to climb that thing in the dark.’
Trenchman nodded.
Akingbola pulled a miniature bottle of rum from his pack and twisted the cap with a gloved hand. He stood at the jagged peak of the atoll and raised the bottle in salute.
‘Take it easy, bro.’
‘And you.’
Trenchman stood, turned and started to climb.
30
Moonlit rocks.
Trenchman pulled himself upwards ledge by ledge. Gloved hands brushed grit aside to clear handholds. He looked down at the crags below. Icy lunar light messed with perspective.
Timeless terrain. Easy to imagine Palaeolithic man scaling the heights to chew a psychotropic root and commune with the savage gods of the wilderness. Maybe, in daylight, these rocks would reveal themselves to be stained with ochre handprints, representations of horses and hunting kills, the petroglyph dream-life of men that lived in the penumbral regions of the desert.
His ascent blocked by vertical rock spurs. Smooth, nothing to grip. He couldn’t climb higher, so he worked sideways, headed right, clambering one shelf to another.
Some kind of mine entrance. A cave mouth framed by prop beams. Dug by prospectors looking to strike borax, or locate a uranium seam.