Douglas Preston - Mount Dragon

Levine turned back to the wizard-image. “You’ve reproduced the island in perfect detail, except your own house. It’s in ruins. Why?”

The figure was still a moment, and no sound came through the elevator speaker. Levine wondered what nerve he had touched. Then the figure raised the gun again. “I think we’ve spoken enough now, Charles,” Scopes said.

“I’m not impressed by the gun.”

“You should be. You are simply a process within the matrix of my program. If I shoot, the thread of your process will halt. You will be stuck, with no way to communicate with me or anyone else. But it’s largely academic now. While we were chatting about my creation, I sent a sniffer routine back over your trail, tracking you across the network backbone until I located your terminal. It can’t be too comfortable, stuck there in Elevator Forty-nine between the seventh and eighth floors. A welcoming party is already on its way, so you might as well sit tight.”

“What are you going to do?” Levine asked.

“Me? I’m not going to do anything. You, however, are going to die. Your arrogant break-in, along with this latest round of snooping into my business, really leaves me little choice. As an intruder, of course, your killing will be justifiable homicide. I’m sorry, Charles, I truly am. It didn’t need to end this way.”

Levine raised his fingers to type a reply, then stopped. There was nothing he could say.

“Now I’m going to terminate the program. Good-bye, Charles.”

The figure took careful aim.

For the first time since entering the GeneDyne building, Levine was afraid.

Carson woke with a start. It was still dark, but dawn was approaching: As he looked out, he could see the sky beginning to separate itself from the black mouth of the cave. A few yards away, Susana was still asleep on the sand. He could hear the soft, regular sound of her breathing.

He propped himself up on one elbow, aware of a dull nagging thirst. Crawling on hands and knees to the edge of the spring, he cupped the warm water in his hands, drinking it greedily. As the thirst died, a gnawing hunger began to assert itself in the depths of his belly.

Standing, he walked to the mouth of the cave and breathed the cool, predawn air. The horses were a few hundred yards off, grazing quietly. He whistled softly and they lifted their heads, perking their ears at his presence. He walked toward them, stepping carefully in the darkness. They were a little gaunt, but otherwise seemed to have survived their ordeal quite well. He stroked Roscoe’s neck. The horse’s eyes were bright and clear, a good sign. He bent down and felt the coronet at the top of the hoof. It was warm but not hot, showing no sign of laminitis.

He looked around in the gathering light. The surrounding mountains were carved from tilted sandstone, their sedimentary layers running at crazy diagonals through the eroded humps and canyons. As he watched, their summits became infused with the scarlet light of the rising sun. There was a stillness to the air almost religious in its force: the silence of a cathedral before the organ sounds. Where the muscled flanks of the mountains sank into the desert, the skirts of the lava flow cloaked their base in a black, jagged mass. Their own cave was hidden from view, below the level of the desert. Standing one hundred yards from it, Carson would never have dreamed there was anything around but black lava. There was no sign of Nye.

Carson watered the horses again in the cave and then hobbled them in a fresh patch of tobosa grass. Then, locating a mesquite bush, he used his spearpoint to cut off a long flexible sucker, with a cluster of stobs and thorns at the end. He walked out of the lava and into the desert, examining the sand carefully as he went. Soon, he found what he was looking for: the tracks of a rabbit, still young and relatively small. He followed them for a hundred yards until they disappeared into a hole underneath a Mormon-tea bush. Squatting down, he shoved the thorny end of the stick down the hole, threading it through several turns, and—when it reached the den— prodding and twisting, feeling a furry resistance. Twisting more vigorously now, he slowly pulled the stick back out of the hole. A young rabbit, whose loose skin had been caught and twisted up in the stobs, struggled and grunted. Carson pinned it with his foot and cut off its head, letting the blood drain into the sand. Then he gutted, skinned, and spitted it, buried the offal in the sand to deter buzzards, and returned to the cave.

De Vaca was still sleeping. At the mouth of the cave he built a small fire, rubbed the rabbit with more alkali salt from his pocket, and began roasting it. The meat spit and sizzled, the blue smoke drifting into the clear air.

Now at last the sun came above the horizon, throwing a brilliant shower of golden light across the desert floor and deep into the cave, illuminating its dark surfaces. There was a noise and Carson turned to see de Vaca, sitting up at last and rubbing her eyes sleepily.

“Ouch,” she said as the golden light flared in her face and turned her black hair to bronze.

Carson watched her with the smugly virtuous smile of an early riser. His eyes strayed from her to the interior of the cave. De Vaca, seeing his expression change, turned to follow his gaze.

The rising sun was shining through a crack in the cave opening, striping a needle of orange light across the floor of the cave and halfway up its rear wall. Balanced atop the needle and illuminated against the rough rock was a jagged, yet immediately recognizable image: an eagle, wings spread and head upraised as if about to burst into flight.

They watched in silence as the image grew brighter, until it seemed it would be forever branded into the rear of the cave. And then, as suddenly as it had flared up, it died away; the sun rose above the mouth of the cave, and the eagle vanished into the growing superfluity of light.

“ El Ojo del Águila ,” De Vaca said. “The Spring of the Eagle. Now we know we found it. Incredible to think that this same spring saved my ancestors’ lives four hundred years ago.”

“And now it’s saving ours,” Carson murmured. He continued to stare at the dark space where the image had been for a moment, as if trying to recall a thought that was dancing just beyond the verge of consciousness. Then the wonderful aroma of roasting meat filled his nostrils, and he turned back to the rabbit.

“Hungry?” he asked.

“You’re damn right. What is it?”

“Rabbit.” He turned it, then pulled it from the fire and stuck the spit upright in the sand. Taking out the spearpoint, he sliced off a haunch and handed it to de Vaca.

“Careful, it’s hot.”

Gingerly, she took a bite.

“Delicious. You can cook, too. I assumed all you cowboys knew how to make was beans in bacon fat.”

She sank her teeth into the haunch, peeling off another piece of meat. “And it’s not even tough, like the rabbits my grandfather used to bring home.” She spat out a small bone. Carson watched her eat with a cook’s secret pride.

In ten minutes the rabbit was gone and the cleaned bones burning, in the fire, De Vaca sat back, licking her fingers. “How’d you catch that rabbit?” she asked.

Carson shrugged. “Just something I picked up on the ranch as a kid.”

De Vaca nodded. Then she smiled wickedly. “That’s right, I forgot. All Indians know how to hunt. It’s an instinct, right?”

Carson frowned, his complacence dissolving under this unwarranted dig. “Give it a rest,” he grumbled. “It wasn’t funny the first time, and it certainly isn’t funny now.”

But de Vaca was still smiling. “You should see yourself. That day in the sun did you good. A few more like it, and you’ll look right at home on the Big Rez.”