‘How long will you leave me out here?’ he shouted.
‘Haven’t given it much thought.’
Frost pulled a bandana from her pocket, dabbed perspiration from her brow and neck.
‘If you want me dead, then man-up and put a bullet in my brain.’
‘I’ll sit you in the shade soon enough. Just want to see you sweat a little first. Childish retribution, but fuck it. Maybe it’ll encourage you to act like a reasonable human being.’
She browsed the survival manual and studied a line drawing.
She leant forwards and dug a hole. She fetched a plastic beaker from the plane and set it in the hole. She slit open a plastic bag, placed it over the hole and pegged it down with a couple of wrenches.
‘Condensation still. Might be able to decant a dribble of water if we leave it overnight. And it’s a good way to purify urine. Use evaporation to filter the liquid clean. So if you need a piss, you let me know, you hear?’
She unzipped the trauma kit.
She pulled off a boot, untied the splints and examined her injured leg.
‘Still planning to take a walk?’ asked Hancock.
‘Yeah. Head for the mountains. Hoping you’ll see sense and join me.’
‘If I don’t? Going to leave me tied to this fucking wheel?’
‘I’ll cut you lose when I go.’
‘How about water?’
‘Fifty-fifty split. I’ll drain half from the tank, carry it on my back. Leave you with the rest.’
‘What about Pinback and his pals? How am I supposed to defend myself?’
‘That won’t be a problem.’
‘How do you figure?’
‘Because, when they show up tonight, I aim to kill them.’
43
Sunset.
Noble stumbled through endless dunes.
‘Bobbi,’ he shouted. ‘Bobbi, you there?’
Noble willed her voice to come to him.
‘Come on, Bobbi. Talk to me.’
Hours teetering on the edge of madness. Why couldn’t he will himself over the precipice? Why couldn’t his broken mind allow a retreat into dreams?
Countless times he had stood outside the barracks at Andrews Air Force Base, ignored CANNOT CONNECT TO NETWORK and thumbed his wife’s number.
Torrential rain. Standing on the barrack porch, phone pressed to his ear.
‘Love you, babe.’ Feeling connected to his Cedar Street home despite the absence of signal bars. The kitchen counter where he often ate breakfast, hair still wet from the shower. He would sip coffee, watch birds perch on the yard fence. ‘I miss you. Love to Malcolm. Hope to see you both soon.’ A kind of prayer. Committing his love to UHF.
Why couldn’t she be here now? Why couldn’t he summon her from memory?
‘Hey. Bobbi? You there?’
No sound but the rasp of his own breathing, the crunch of his boots, the blood-rush in his ears.
He was irrevocably sane, fully present, condemned to endure merciless heat, merciless light.
Noble staggered across sand, determined to cover as much ground as he could before dark.
A glint on the horizon. The wrecked limo still sitting beached among the dunes.
Trenchman’s parting words:
‘Don’t get caught in the open at night. Not if you can help it. Find shelter. Once they get your scent, they won’t quit.’
Noble broke into a run.
The limo.
Noble tossed his backpack through a shattered side-window. He squirmed through the window and rolled onto a bench seat. He lay on sand-dusted leatherette, panting with exhaustion.
Fitful moonlight shafted through the windows. The limo interior glowed with phosphorescent light.
Noble pulled down his bandana mask, bit the fingers of his gloves and tugged them from his hands.
He uncapped his canteen and let water wet his lips and tongue. He quickly resealed the cap in case he lost self control and drained the canteen dry.
He unlaced his boots and kicked them off. He slapped sand from crusted socks. He massaged blistered feet.
No sound but the mournful wind-whisper of the desert night.
He sat back, pulled a sheaf of research notes from his backpack and thumbed pages by torchlight. Too tired to make sense of the text. He shut off his flashlight and set the pages aside.
He turned up his collar, curled foetal on the back seat and fell into a fitful sleep.
Noble snapped awake. Vague sense of unease.
He lay beneath a blanket of research notes. He shuffled them neat and stuffed them in his backpack.
He sat up.
Stench of rotted flesh.
A heavy thud. He flinched.
Slow, deliberate footsteps. Someone pacing the roof.
He snatched the Beretta from its holster. Footfalls directly above his head. Heart-pounding adrenalin rush.
He looked out the window. Moon shadows. The silhouette of a man crouched directly above him on the limo roof.
A guttural, dirt-clogged voice:
‘How you doing, Harris?’
‘Early?’
‘Long journey. Bet you’re exhausted.’
Noble took aim and fired a shot into the ceiling. The retort made his ears sing. Coiling barrel fumes filled the compartment like cigarette smoke.
A smouldering notch in the roof vinyl. A pencil beam of moonlight shafted through the bullet hole.
The moonbeam flicked as the figure on the roof paced back and forth.
‘What if this landscape exists in your head? What if you’re not actually here, in the desert? Ever think of that? Remember that mountain bike you used to ride round town? Maybe you fell off and hit your head. You could be in a hospital bed right now, comatose, surrounded by beeping machines. What do you think this fucked-up desolation would say about your subconscious? Must hate your own guts. Every dune, every grain of sand, built it to punish yourself. Your mind could have taken refuge in a tropical paradise. You could be reclining on a beach right now. Palm trees, bikini girls, mojito. Instead you chose this nightmare.’
‘You’re not Early. You’re an echo, reflex. All this talk. It’s like zapping the legs of a dissected frog to make them twitch.’
Long silence.
‘Trenchman was right, wasn’t he? You. The virus. You’re studying us.’
Long silence.
Noble slowly pulled the flashlight from his vest pocket.
‘You could snuff us out in an instant. Me. Frost. Hancock. Why play games? Are you tormenting us, like a kid frying ants with a magnifying glass?’
Noble lunged out of a side window, pistol at the ready. The light-cone of his flashlight lit the empty roof.
He shone the flashlight at surrounding dunes. No tracks.
‘You’re nothing,’ he shouted, bellowing into darkness. ‘A germ. A string of RNA. Come on. Face me, motherfucker.’
The limo shuddered and lurched. Noble fell back inside the vehicle. He dropped his flashlight and gripped the seat. Deafening torsion and metal shriek.
The limo shook like it was taking a series of heavy side-impacts.
He hit the floor.
Another sudden jolt. The front of the Humvee dropped like both front tyres had simultaneously blown out.
Sudden wrench. Explosion of dust beyond the hood of the limo. The vehicle began to tilt nose-down, front fender disappearing beneath the sand as it was dragged below ground.
Noble grabbed his flashlight as it rolled past and trained the beam on the driver’s compartment. Sand pouring through the side windows, the windshield, filling the footwells, engulfing the dash.
Groan and judder. He gripped the stripper pole. Some Herculean force continued to wrench the limo below ground in a series of powerful jerks.
The gradient inside the vehicle grew more precipitous as the nose sank further. Noble hugged the stripper pole. Boots pedalled carpet as he scrambled for a foothold.