Read Online Panic! by Bill Pronzini - Free Book Online

basalt rock and small black lava cones; there were natural bridges, arches, mounds, knobs, shapes of every description—a fairyland or a nightmare, depending on the direction of the viewer’s imagination. And to Jana’s continuing surprise, there were few totally barren patches, and no sand dunes at all.
    As she watched, a sudden flurry of activity occurred almost directly in front of her. A small dun-colored roadrunner, moving with great speed, flashed out of a clump of mesquite, raced thirty or forty yards across the rocky earth, and then struck with a slashing motion of its long sharp bill; its feathered head jerked up a moment later, a gecko lizard held firmly by the head, struggling in vain. The roadrunner carried its prey off quickly, vanishing as rapidly as it had appeared.
    Jana repressed a shudder and went to where she had parked the Triumph a few yards away. From inside, she took the handbag with her sketch pad, notebook, and writing and drawing implements—and the sack containing the food and water she had purchased in Cuenca Seco. She arranged these on the blanket and sat down in the exact center of it, Indian fashion, with the sketch pad open across her lap.
    Well, she thought, here we are. The wide-open spaces. Nature in the raw. The Wild, Wild West. Beats the stifling, sweating, polluted canyons of New York City all to hell, doesn’t it?
    Sure it does.
    You bet.
    She picked up a piece of thick charcoal and began to draw the patriarchal saguaro with rapid, fluid strokes.

Seven
     
    The runner, running:
    There, among the pinnacles of rock, the element-polished stone like slick glass beneath his feet, stumbling, falling now and then, the palms of his hands cut by razor-edged chunks of ancient granite. There, looking over his shoulder, eyes afraid, face coated with dry alkali dust through which flowing sweat has created meandering streams. There, emerging from a profusion of rocks momentarily to cross a shallow wash, churning legs digging up small geysers from the sand, half-blind with the sweat and the constant yellow-white glare of the sun. There, among rocks again, knee lancing painfully off a projection of sandstone, elbow scraping another projection, looking over his shoulder again, tripping again, falling again, getting up again, single thought, single purpose.
    The labored gasping of his breath, the raging beat of his heart, the hammering pulse of his blood fill the tiny vacuum in which he moves with nightmarish sound, even though he is surrounded by stillness. His body is a mass of twisted nerve ends and small aches, and his eyes are painful under heat-inflamed lids. How much longer can he keep moving? How much further can the blind panic carry him?
    Not long, not far. Less than five minutes has elapsed when he falls again, and this time he cannot seem to regain his feet. He kneels on the rough ground, resting forward on his hands, his head hanging down and his mouth open to drink of the burning air. As he crouches there, animal-like, the urgency begins to suddenly die in him—as it had finally died that night he struck Phyllis; exhaustion has dulled the sharp, bright edge of the panic, and the urge to flight is no longer indomitable within his brain.
    He mewls for breath until the pace of his heart decelerates, until the blood ceases throbbing in his temples, his ears. Then he turns his body and looks behind him and sees nothing; there is nothing but the rocks and the heat and the desert vegetation. He allows his weight to fall wearily onto his right hip, but the lambent rays of the sun burn his face, burn his neck, and the stones there in the direct shine are like bits of molten metal. He drags himself a few feet distant, to where an arched and delicately fanned sandstone ledge, like a giant ostrich plume, offers shade; it is cooler there, and the intense glare of light diminishes.
    Lennox wipes sweat from his aching eyes, and again looks back the way he has come. Emptiness. He does not know how far