William Dietrich - Getting back

He unwrapped the matches and put one carefully in a breast pocket.

There were already voices outside the hole. They'd tried to rush him and were baffled at his disappearance until they spied the tunnel. Now someone was scrabbling in. Tucker struck the other match, held it to the fuse, and waited. Nothing. A dud. Oh boy, Amaya. And then there was a flash, a fizz, and the bomb began burning. God be praised, the crazy woman had done it! He dropped the smoking sphere in front of him and began wriggling backward toward the eastern entrance, light from the fuse helping illuminate the way. He heard cries of alarm and a frantic crawling from the convicts.

Then the light went out with a smothering hiss. "I got it!" Someone had extinguished the thing.

"Damn!" Tucker reversed course and hurriedly crawled back, seeing the dim shape of someone backing up the tunnel. He caught up with the bomb snatcher just as the other man was about to wriggle out, and grabbed.

There was a grunt of pain and a curse. Jago, Rugard's guard! The man stank from the smoke of the burning cabin roof. The convict and Tucker grappled awkwardly in the tight space, the others clustered outside the tunnel entrance. "He's got me!" Jago shouted. "Get me the hell out of here!" Tucker was punching, clawing, butting, trying to get the bomb back. It was like a struggle for a football. Hands were reaching in, clutching at them both, and he felt the two of them being inexorably hauled out of the tunnel. Jago was cutting him, he realized- a knife, he supposed- and he chopped at the man's throat, stopping the irritation. The bomb came loose and Tucker clutched it to his own breast. Men were starting to pummel his body as they pulled him out toward the open.

The match. Broken, but he could feel the piece with the head in his pocket.

The mob was howling, yanking them like a cork from a bottle, whooping at the opportunity for revenge. Tucker felt Jago being jerked away from him and then hands dragging, punching, tearing. Their screams of frustration filled his ears, the anger hitting him harder than the pain. He lit his match and pressed it to the fuse. Please, let me succeed at something just once, he prayed.

Just once.

He felt a curious lightness as they beat him. The future had disappeared, and with it the weight of the past. Here in the eroded cluster of sculpted rock, carved by unimaginable eons of time, he was at the cumulative instant he was supposed to be at, he recognized. All his life had come down to this. So when the fuse flared and screams erupted and hands clutched frantically at the bomb, he felt a curious serenity. Tucker had found his why.

Then the bomb went off.

The quartet of fleeing adventurers heard the boom of the explosion as they ran out into the broad desert, the horizon flush with the coming sun. The thudding roar echoed and reechoed among the labyrinth of canyons, sending startled birds flying prematurely up and into the morning air.

They stopped and turned. There was a groan of collapsing rock and a following rumble, as if stones were sliding down to seal the defile more completely. "It worked," Amaya said quietly, as if she'd never really been convinced the ancient formula could be quite so simple. "It exploded."

"Did he make it?" It was Ethan, asking a question he knew couldn't be rationally answered yet. A cloud of smoke and dust rolled out of the slit they had emerged from.

The noise finally grumbled away and there was dead silence.

"No," said Daniel, knowing the answer without knowing it. "He didn't."

Amaya was silently weeping.

"Let's not make it be for nothing," Ethan finally said. "We have to be out of sight by sunrise and lay low until it's safe to trigger the beacon. Maybe tomorrow night."

"We can't," Daniel said.

"Can't what?"

"Trigger the beacon. We can't signal for rescue. We can't penetrate the Cone."

"I thought you said you got it!"

"I got the transmitter but… I threw the activator at Ico." He looked at Raven. "You two are going to have to hike to the coast with us."

The other three looked stunned. Amaya was looking from Daniel to Raven, crestfallen.

"It's better this way," he said. "Not some of us fly off, some of us stay."

Raven was looking at him in shock. "Oh, Daniel," she whispered.

"It will give us time to ask why we do."

Then he turned, and led the way into the rising sun.

"Lord, what a painting."

Rugard Sloan, blackened and scorched, turned a grim circle at the mouth of what had been the tunnel. Fresh rock had covered it, and the walls nearby had been sprayed with gore. One man had done this, he thought, one big man he hadn't had time to reach with reason. One man! This giant named Tucker had killed five men, wounded half a dozen more, and turned the remaining pack of pursuers into a band of drunken, sick, whipped dogs. Rugard couldn't have driven them on at gunpoint, not right now.

The snitch Ico had lived by hanging back because of his little spear cut, whimpering like a punished child. Rugard himself had been saved by the death of a man in front of him, a flesh-and-blood shield that had knocked him flat. He was spattered with offal and singed and grimy from the flames of his own roof. They'd made a fool of him, of that he was certain.

Otherwise, it was hard to think. The Warden's ears were ringing and his head ached. There was a fuzziness to his vision he suspected would take hours to go away. And in front of him was a wall of unstable rock, sealing the fugitives' exit route. Men could climb over it or dig through it, he knew, but none had the stomach for it at the moment. Least of all him. The bastards were gone, escaped into the desert, and to follow them he'd have to organize a party with proper food and water to hunt them down. It was maddening.

Despite this fiasco, Rugard knew the others would look to him for answers. People were dung, expendable and cheap, and they'd follow a strong man as far as he'd lead them. The Warden felt not a thing for the men who had just been blown to bits by the explosion. They were fools to be in the front rank.

He limped back down the canyon past his groaning, stunned men. Explosives! How? Had that bitch Raven brought them with her? There was something odd about her, some lack of ordinary fear and confusion. He hadn't liked her arrogance from the start. She'd scorned his advances, was condescending to his authority, and was probably laughing at him right now. Clearly she knew too much. And she'd go on laughing until he hunted her down and had her in a different way. And then turned her whole being into a bloody locus of pain.

"We can't let them go."

Rugard turned. It was the weasel. He held men like that in contempt, but they were necessary. This little pissant might know where the others were going.

"We've got to get it back, so we can get back," Ico mumbled, as dazed by the explosion as the others. "The activator is useless until we get the transmitter to hook it to."

"Obviously," Rugard growled. "And you're going to help get it for me. You're going to help me hunt them down in the desert by telling me which way they'll go. They can't get back either, not without us. Right?"

Ico winced. "Not exactly." He looked down in wonder at his bloody arm. Welcome to real life, he thought drolly. It ached like hell. "I know where they're going, I think."

"Where?"

"The coast. Raven thinks the transmitter alone will work there."

"What!"

"If we don't catch them before they reach it, she'll be gone." Ico looked around morosely. He'd thought he'd be leaving these cretins in hours, or days. Now he might be stuck with them for weeks or months.

"We'll catch them then." They'd follow the thieves to wherever they might run, Rugard thought. Use them to assuage his own humiliation. Get the transmitter to unite with its activator. And then take proper vengeance on the whole damnable world.