“What is it?” I said.
“Turkey buzzards flying in and out of the smoke. But they’re too big.”
“What’s too big?”
“What I saw,” she said. “They were as big as people.”
I took back the binoculars. “There’s a big gush of black smoke rising from between two of the boulders. Is that what you saw?”
“No, it didn’t look like smoke at all.”
We were on a narrow deer trail about a third of the way to the bus when we heard the dry, clattering sound of slag or small rocks above us. Jo Anne looked up, then grabbed my arm.
“Oh, Aaron!” she said. “Oh my God, Aaron!”
“What?” I said, off balance from her pressure on my arm.
“On that ledge.” She fumbled in her bag for the gun, then dropped it. She looked up again. “Oh, God! Oh, God! Oh, God!”
Now I could see them, four or five of them, going from rock to rock. They looked like stick figures, similar in structure to a praying mantis but as tall as human beings. They bounded away as fast as they had come.
“You saw that, didn’t you?” she said.
“Yes,” I replied.
“What are they?” she said. I could hear her breathing when I didn’t answer.
“I don’t know what they are.”
She picked up the .38 and tried to give it to me. “I never shot a gun.”
“I don’t want it,” I said.
“You’re suddenly a pacifist? While we die here?”
I saw the look on her face and didn’t argue. “There’s an answer to this, but we’ll find it elsewhere. Start walking toward the entrance. Don’t look back. If anything happens to me, keep going.”
Minutes later, I saw sparks spiraling into the air just outside the canyon, followed by a great red, black, and yellow ball of flame rising from the windows and roof of my car. The stick figures had formed a chain across the canyon’s entrance.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
I COULD SEE NO way out except up. If we kept going and stayed in the shadows, eventually we would find another deer trail, one that could take us to a cliff or a place where we could get over the lip of the canyon. The problem was the stick figures we had seen in the rocks. What were they? I knew there was no rational explanation for what we had seen. Please don’t misunderstand. I have never been keen on the physical sciences, because most of them usually end in a cul-de-sac. Einstein believed that parallel lines intersect on the edges of infinity. Try to visualize that and see what it does to your head. If the physical sciences don’t always slide down the pipe, who can say the stick figures were not real?
We worked our way along the canyon wall, the trail smooth and clean and worn from the passage of both hoofed and foot-padded animals, the stone cool to the touch. The boulders around us were enormous and shielded us from view of the people in the bus or those who had built the fires. Jo Anne was in front of me, pausing at each bend in the trail before continuing on. I could see stars through the trees that rimmed the canyon. There was a dry wash twenty yards ahead of us, slanted at forty degrees. With luck, it would put us on a ledge where we could stay until sunrise, when the nightmare world we had stumbled into would recede like a harmless shadow.
“Jo,” I whispered.
She turned around, then stepped into a hole, twisting her ankle, her mouth opening silently, her face draining. I grabbed her before she could fall and lowered her to the ground. “I think I tore it,” she said.
I cupped my hand on her ankle. It was already hot. “Hang on,” I said. I worked her back against a boulder so she could sit up comfortably and keep her ankle straight out and the other leg pulled up. I took off my coat and put it behind her head.
“Go on, get out of here,” she said.
“That won’t happen.”
“That’s what you told me to do if you got hurt.”
“I learned long ago not to take my own advice.”