George Chesbro - Second Horseman Out of Eden

Pull! Pull! Pull!

Pull! Pull! Pull!

There seemed no point in trying to see what progress I was making, and no point at all in looking behind, and so I screwed my eyes shut, sucked in a deep breath, then opened them to slits and concentrated only on trying to keep the kayak pointed in the right direction. The only point was somehow to keep going. I tried not to think of the pain and fire in me, and tried to find solace in the fact that Tanker Thompson, despite his seemingly superhuman endurance and tolerance for pain, also had to be hurting; if I could suddenly collapse with a heart attack, or simply run out of gas and pass out, then-damn it-so could he.

I hoped. I certainly had to admit that Tanker Thompson was the closest thing to a flesh and blood demon I had ever come across, a terrifying creature that kept popping up, back, from death by freezing, bludgeoning, and bullets like some malevolent jack-in-the-box from hell.

That's the kind of thinking an oxygen-starved brain will give you, I mused, and might have smiled if I'd had the energy.

In any case, I just didn't think Tanker Thompson was going to do me any favors by having a heart attack or passing out. Just as I was operating far over the edge, discovering reserves of energy and determination inside myself I wouldn't have imagined I had, because I was driven by the need to save one child in particular and millions of people in general, so, too, was Thompson operating far over his edge, driven by his equally fervent desire-implanted, he fully believed, by God-to see this child and those millions of people die.

Pull! Pull! Pull!

I knew I was now in danger of completely losing it; the fire in me had spread up to my neck, down to my toes, and my head felt like it was ready to explode. I was breathing in a series of small, tortured gasps, and my windpipe felt like it would seize up and close at any moment.

Pull! Pull! Pull!

Desperately, I tried to concentrate on images of scorched earth, flattened buildings, craters in the ground-and bodies; millions of bodies. That was what was going to happen if I couldn't reach and destroy the transmitter.

I wondered what time it was.

Pull! Pull. .

A universe of pain, a world without air, heart and lungs that felt ready to burst at any moment. I tried to recall what I was doing, why I was suffering, where I was going, and what it was I was supposed to do when I got there.

Pull. .

Somewhere, sometime soon, something horrible was going to happen unless. .

Unless. .

"Mr. Mongo, wake up! Wake up!"

Oh-oh. I snapped awake to find myself slumped forward in the portal of the kayak. My hands were empty, the paddle having slipped from my fingers. I was wondering how long I'd been out, then realized that it could only have been seconds; I could see the paddle ten yards or so to my right, just beginning to float out of sight.

"Mr. Mongo-!"

I spun around and looked up just in time to see Tanker Thompson rear up in the prow of the rowboat, fire ax raised over his head. .

And then the prow of the kayak bumped the shore at the same time as the fire ax came swinging down, narrowly missing my head, crushing the stern of the kayak. I rolled to my left, out of the portal and into the water, put my feet down and touched bottom. I plucked Vicky out of the front portal, staggered up on the shore, and set her down.

A metal structure perhaps three feet high, enclosed in what looked like an inverted test tube with an enormous aerial atop it, rose out of the sand perhaps twenty yards up a slope, slightly to my left, clearly visible in the green light of the artificial world.

"Run, Vicky!" I shouted hoarsely as I struggled up the slope that suddenly seemed as steep as Mount Everest, feet plowing in the dirty sand. "Run!"

"Wo!" Tanker Thompson's deep voice, equally hoarse, boomed from behind me. "Don't you dare run away, Vicky! You belong to your parents and to God, not this man!"

To my horror, Vicky Brown, clearly terrified, suddenly stopped at the crest of the slope, beside the transmitter, and slowly turned back. Her small body was trembling all over.

I glanced over my shoulder, saw that Tanker Thompson was out of the water and onto the shore-but he was obviously hurting pretty good, too. Dragging his injured leg behind him, leaning on the fire ax, he lurched forward, then stumbled, did a pirouette, and fell on his face. I turned back to the child, struggled to yell, but could no longer make any sounds come out of my swollen throat. I mouthed the words.

Run! You'll be killed!

But the child remained frozen in place. In the ghostly light, her tiny body was framed by a soaring, greenish-black mass that almost seemed to be flowing behind her. What remained of the rain forest was clearly now nothing but melting biomass rotting and running down to accelerate the pollution of Eden.

Behind me, Tanker Thompson was using the handle of the fire ax to haul himself to his feet.

Once again able to suck air into my lungs after my brief rest stop, I resumed my labored struggle up the side of the slope. I reached the top, grabbed the revolver from the waistband of my jeans, and used the butt of the ruined weapon to smash the glass case over the transmitter. I tore wires from the terminals of the huge storage batteries powering it, then smashed the butt against the transmitter itself-once, twice, three times. The LED lights on a panel in front went out. I grabbed the antenna and snapped it off before slumping to the ground, quite thoroughly exhausted. I raised my head, still more than mildly curious to see what kind of progress Tanker Thompson was making.

I estimated that I had about six feet of life left-the distance between Thompson and his fire ax and me. And then even that was gone as he loomed over me, his earless, blood-covered skull appearing decidedly otherworldly as he stared down at me with his raisin eyes that now seemed virtually lifeless.

"… Over," I croaked. "It's over. Please. . please don't kill the girl."

"I won't kill her," Thompson mumbled through lips that I could now see were covered with froth. "She will go to God with her parents, as God wants her to."

"No … no sense. No. ."

He staggered slightly, then planted his feet wider apart and used both hands to lift the ax over his head. The ax head simply kept arcing backward as his hands released their grip on the handle. A bullet hole had appeared in his temple, just above a ragged piece of flesh that had once been his ear. Still, he didn't go down. Even with a bullet in his brain, he continued to stagger around like some grotesque chicken. He finally collapsed when a second shot rang out, and his right earhole widened.

I wearily turned my head to the right, the direction the shots had come from, to see who my savior might be, and was not at all surprised to see my brother, standing in a green-striped golf cart, slowly lowering his automatic to his side.

The meanest Santa's helper of all.

Garth stuck the automatic into his back pocket, climbed out of the golf cart, and walked steadily but unhurriedly toward us. On his face, in his soft brown eyes, was an expression of incredible gentleness, and I could see tears running down his cheeks. He was looking at Vicky, and when I glanced into the face of the child standing beside me I saw that she was staring back at him with open joy, as if he were a favorite uncle she had known all her life. As he approached, she unhesitatingly ran to him, arms extended, and Garth swept her up in his arms and held her tight.

"It's all right now, Vicky," Garth murmured in her ear. "It's all right."

"Uh. . dear brother of mine?"

Slowly, one of Garth's hands came down and rested itself gently on my shoulder. "You do good work, Mongo," he said softly, in a voice choked with emotion.