He rose with a groan, and with a groan leaned over to pick up his jacket.
"Ciola is evil, you know," she said.
He draped the jacket over the barbed wire and held it down while she climbed awkwardly over.
"Lanaya is worse."
He didn't get it. "Why?"
"I can understand Ciola. But it'll take me a long time to understand Nick."
As tall as a man. And now it began to whisper.
He stumbled over nothing, and commanded his limbs to knock it off. It wasn't as if they were in the middle of the desert, a hundred miles from the nearest civilization. He could already see the fences, could already make out the dim outline of the ranch house. A mile, maybe, he couldn't be sure. But he was acting as though it was ten miles, or more.
Scully sidestepped a prickly pear and nearly walked straight into another. She swiped at it with her suit coat the move turning her in a circle.
"Do you think Sparrow is in on it?"
"What? Sparrow? No, why?"
"He didn't follow us into the reservation, and he wasn't waiting when we came out."
It was too hot to think straight, but he doubted that Sparrow was anything more than understandably skeptical about the whole thing. He was, no doubt, sitting in his office, drinking from his flask, and trying to figure out how he would charm them, or bully them, into getting some credit for the crime's solution. Even if it meant having to accept some magic.
It began to hiss. It began to move.
"There!" Scully announced, "There it is."
They stood on the lip of a shallow arroyo, beside a hand-crafted bridge.
"Thank God, you see it too," Mulder said. "I thought it was a mirage."
They crossed the bridge single file. The vivid green of the lawn was visible now, and through the rising ghostly heat he could make out the house, if not its details.
On the other side, Scully leaned over the rail. "I think those holes in the bank down there are rattlesnake dens."
Mulder wasn't listening.
He had stopped to take a breath, a brief rest on his feet. Without much hope, he checked the gap just in case Ciola, or someone, had taken pity on them, and had followed them in a truck. He also checked the top of the hill, just in case the old man was there. Then he said, "Scully, how fast can you run?"
TWENTY-THREE
It rose out of the arroyo a hundred yards away.
Mulder had expected it to be shaped like a miniature tornado, but it was conical from top to bottom, and cloudy with the debris that whipped around its surface, the source of the hissing it made as it left the dead river and made its way toward them.
Eight feet high; at least four wide in the middle.
Whether it was the force behind it, or the weight of the sand and grit that formed it, it wobbled as it moved, with thin dark bands rippling along its surface, snapping apart and re-forming.
Every so often a gap would appear and he could see right through it; then the gap would dose, swallowed whole.
Had it arrived an hour or two earlier, he didn't doubt they would have had a chance to make it to the house. Its ground speed was not much greater than that of a leisurely trot. Not now, though; not after so much time in the sun.
They ran over the uneven ground as if palsied, as if drunk, veering wildly away from each other, then having to veer again in order not to collide when they tried to rejoin. Serrated grasses slashed at their ankles; shrub and brush stabbed at their arms and legs.
The sun hadn't gone; it was still there, pressing down.
Something exploded in the dirt to Mulder's left, leaving a geyser of dust to hang in the air.
Scully cried out wordlessly in alarm when the top of a cactus shattered as she passed it.
When a third puff rose from the ground a dozen yards away, he realized it was the heavier material caught in the force of it — pebbles, perhaps large twigs; their own weight would eventually fling them out like grapeshot.
They skidded and slid down a short depression.
Mulder glanced back over his shoulder and saw the whirlwind sweep past a small bush, shredding the branches it touched.
Scully grunted and went to one knee, her left hand crossed over to grip her right shoulder. She'd been hit. Mulder raced over and hauled her to her feet, pushed her on when he was struck behind his right knee. He dropped as she had, then launched himself forward as if from a starting block. His right hand went around her shoulders when he reached her, and they supported each other into another depression, and up again.
The ranch house bobbed not that far ahead.
He could see the white split-rail fence, the grass, and no one on the porch.
They didn't know; they couldn't hear.
"How does it know?" Scully demanded.
It hissed along the ground, moving faster, growing taller. Growing darker.
Mulder couldn't tell her. He was distracted by the sudden, guttural roar of an engine, searching wildly until he spotted a battered pickup lurch out of a boiling dust cloud to their right.
He was so startled he didn't see the rock until it was too late. His right foot slid over its smooth, flat surface, and he would have gone down had not Scully gripped him tightly and yanked him, still running, back to his feet.
The porch was still empty; what the hell were they doing in there?
Sweat ran into his eyes, blinding him, stinging.
Scully yelled, and he thought for a moment she'd been hit again, and his shoulders automatically hunched in anticipation. When she yelled a second time, he understood; she was trying to get the attention of the house.
It wouldn't do any good.
The hissing was too loud.
Something large snapped not far behind them, like the crack of a huge bullwhip.
The pickup drew closer, jouncing recklessly over the ground, slipping sideways left and right as the driver tried to keep it in line.
Scully finally noticed and waved at it frantically once, but when Mulder tried to steer them toward it, she suddenly shouldered him away. "Him," was all she was able to say.
Nick Lanaya was behind the wheel, and it didn't take long for Mulder to realize that the man wanted to herd them away from the house, to keep them in the open. It was also the answer to Scully's question: since the man hadn't known exactly where they would be, he would have had to keep them in sight once he'd set the Wind in motion.
Someone stepped out onto the porch.
"Almost there," he gasped. "Hang on, we're almost there."
The pickup aimed right for them,
Mulder stubbornly refused to give ground, forcing his concentration on the maddeningly slow approach of the fence and the lawn. It was Scully who threw them aside when the truck roared by, smothering them in a dust cloud that made it impossible for them to breathe.
The Blood Wind swerved. The hiss deepened to a growling.
He couldn't see anything, but Mulder heard the Wind and urged Scully back to her feet, shoved her ahead of him and pulled out his gun. Not for the Wind, but for the truck, which had swung into a turn so Lanaya could come at them again.
Stalling them.
Dividing their attention between one death and another.
Twenty yards to the fence when Mulder swung his arm around and fired blindly, not expecting to hit anything, just hoping Lanaya would think twice before trying to close again.
The truck didn't stop.
The Wind didn't stop.
Suddenly the ground hardened, and Mulder looked down and realized they had reached the drive.
Scully had already climbed halfway over the fence.
On the porch Nando's wife screamed, and kept on screaming, her hands clutched against her chest.