The wooden floor creaked as he stepped back out into the heavy sunlight.
“No one?” Marian asked and he shook his head. They looked at each other without expression a moment and she patted at her forehead with a damp handkerchief.
“Well, onward,” she said wryly.
That was when they heard the car come rattling down the rutted lane that led off the road into the desert. They walked to the edge of the shack and watched the old, home-made tow truck make its wobbling, noisy approach toward the station. Far back from the road was the low form of the house it had come from.
“To the rescue,” Marian said. “I hope he has water.”
As the truck groaned to a halt beside the shack, they could see the heavily tanned face of the man behind the wheel. He was somewhere in his thirties, a dour looking individual in a T-shirt and patched and faded blue overalls. Lank hair protruded from beneath the brim of his grease-stained Stetson.
It wasn’t a smile he gave them as he slid out of the truck. It was more like a reflex twitching of his lean, humorless mouth. He moved up to them with jerky boot strides, his dark eyes moving from one to the other of them.
“You want gas?” he asked Les in a hard, thick-throated voice.
“Please.”
The man looked at Les a moment as if he didn’t understand. Then he grunted and headed for the Ford, reaching into his back overall pocket for the pump key. As he walked past the front bumper, he glanced down at the license plate.
He stood looking dumbly at the tank cap for a moment, his calloused fingers trying vainly to unscrew it.
“It locks,” Les told him, walking over hurriedly with the keys. The man took them without a word and unlocked the cap. He put the cap on top of the trunk door.
“You want ethyl?” he asked, glancing up, his eyes shadowed by the wide hat brim.
“Please,” Les told him.
“How much?”
“You can fill it.”
The hood was burning hot. Les jerked back his fingers with a gasp. He took out his handkerchief, wrapped it around his hand and pulled up the hood. When he unscrewed the radiator cap, boiling water frothed out and splashed down smoking onto the parched ground.
“Oh, fine,” he muttered to himself.
The water from the hose was almost as hot. Marian came over and put one finger in the slow gush as Les held it over the radiator.
“Oh … gee,” she said in disappointment. She looked over at the overalled man. “Have you got any cool water?” she asked.
The man kept his head down, his mouth pressed into a thin, drooping line. She asked again, without result.
“The hair-triggered Arizonian,” she muttered to Les as she started back toward the man.
“I beg your pardon,” she said.
The man jerked up his head, startled, the pupils of his dark eyes flaring. “Ma’am?” he said quickly.
“Can we get some cool drinking water?”
The man’s rough-skinned throat moved once. “Not here, ma’am,” he said, “but …”
His voice broke off and he looked at her blankly.
“You … you’re from California, ain’t you?” he said.
“That’s right.”
“Goin’ … far?”
“New York,” she said impatiently. “But what about—”
The man’s bleached eyebrows moved together. “New York,” he repeated. “Pretty far.”
“What about the water?” Marian asked him.
“Well,” the man said, his lips twitching into the outline of a smile, “I ain’t got none here but if you want to drive back to the house, my wife’ll get you some.”
“Oh.” Marian shrugged slightly. “All right.”
“You can look at my zoo while my wife gets the water,” the man offered, then crouched down quickly beside the fender to listen and hear if the tank was filling up.
“We have to go back to his house to get water,” Marian told Les as he unscrewed one of the battery caps.
“Oh? Okay.”
The man turned off the pump and replaced the cap.
“New York, haah?” he said, looking at them. Marian smiled politely and nodded.
After Les had pushed the hood back down, they got into the car to follow the man’s truck back to the house.
“He has a zoo,” Marian said, expressionlessly.
“How nice,” Les said as he let up the clutch and the car rolled down off the slight rise on which the gas pumps stood.
“They make me mad,” Marian said.
They’d seen dozens of the zoos since they’d left Los Angeles. They were usually located beside gas stations—designed to lure extra customers. Invariably, they were pitiful collections—barren little cages in which gaunt foxes cringed, staring out with sick, glazed eyes, rattlesnakes coiled lethargically, maybe a feather-molted eagle glowered from a dark cage corner. And, usually, in the middle of the so-called zoo would be a chained-up wolf or coyote; a straggly woe-be-gone creature who paced constantly in a circle whose radius was the length of the chain; who never looked at the people but stared straight ahead with red-rimmed eyes, pacing endlessly on thin stalks of legs.
“I hate them,” Marian said bitterly.
“I know, baby,” Les said.
“If we didn’t need water, I’d never go back to his damned old house.”
Les smiled. “Okay ma,” he said quietly, trying to avoid the holes in the lane. “Oh.” He snapped two fingers. “I forgot to ask him how to get back to the highway.”
“Ask him when we get to his house,” she said.
The house was faded brown, a two-story wooden structure that looked a hundred years old. Behind it stood a row of low, squarish huts.
“The zoo,” Les said. “Lions ’n tigers ’n everything.”
“Nuts,” she said.
He pulled up in front of the quiet house and saw the man in the Stetson slide off the dusty seat of his truck and jump down off the running board.
“Get you the water,” he said quickly and started for the house. He stopped a moment and looked back. “Zoo’s in the back,” he said, gesturing with his head.
They watched him move up the steps of the old house. Then Les stretched and blinked at the glaring sunlight.
“Shall we look at the zoo?” he asked, trying not to smile.
“No.”
“Oh, come on.”
“No, I don’t want to see that.”
“I’m going to take a look.”
“Well … all right,” she said, “but it’s going to make me mad.”
They walked around the edge of the house and moved along its side in the shade.
“Oh, does that feel good,” Marian said.
“Hey, he forgot to ask for his money.”
“He will,” she said.
They approached the first cage and looked into the dim interior through the two-foot-square window that was barred with thick doweling.
“Empty,” Les said.
“Good.”
“Some zoo.”
They walked slowly toward the next cage. “Look how small they are,” Marian said unhappily. “How would he like to be cooped up in one of them?”
She stopped walking.
“No, I’m not going to look,” she said angrily, “I don’t want to see how the poor things are suffering.”
“I’ll just take a look,” he said.
“You’re a fiend.”
She heard him chuckle as she stood watching him walk up to the second of the cages. He looked in.
“Marian!” His cry made her body twitch.
“What is it?” she asked, running to him anxiously.
“Look.”
He stared with shocked eyes into the cage.
Her whisper trembled. “Oh my God.”
There was a man in the cage.
She looked at him with unbelieving eyes, unconscious of the large drops of sweat trickling across her brow and down her temples.
The ma
n was lying on the floor, sprawled like a broken doll across a dirty army blanket. His eyes were open but the man saw nothing. His pupils were dilated, he looked doped. His grimy hands rested limply on the thinly-strawed floor, motionless twists of flesh and bone. His mouth hung open like a yellow-toothed wound, edged with dry, cracking lips.
When Les turned, he saw that Marian was already looking at him, her face blank, the skin drawn tautly over her paling cheeks.
“What is this?” she asked in a faint tremor of voice.
“I don’t know.”
He glanced once more into the cage as if he already doubted what he’d seen. Then he was looking at Marian again. “I don’t know,” he repeated, feeling the heartbeats throb heavily in his chest.
Another moment they looked at each other, their eyes stark with uncomprehending shock.
“What are we going to do?” Marian asked, almost whispering the words.
Les swallowed the hard lump in his throat. He looked into the cage again. “Hel-lo,” he heard himself say, “can you—”
He broke off abruptly, throat moving again. The man was comatose.
“Les, what if—”
He looked at her. And, suddenly, his scalp was crawling because Marian was looking in wordless apprehension at the next cage.
His running footsteps thudded over the dry earth, raising the dust.
“No,” he murmured, looking into the next cage. He felt himself shudder uncontrollably as Marian ran up to him.
“Oh my God, this is hideous,” she cried, staring with sick fright at the second caged man.
They both started as the man looked up at them with glazed, lifeless eyes. For a moment, his slack body lurched up a few inches and his dry lips fluttered as though he were trying to speak. A thread of saliva ran from one corner of his mouth and dribbled down across his beardblackened chin. For a moment his sweaty, dirt-lined face was a mask of impotent entreaty.
Then his head rolled to one side and his eyes rolled back.
Marian backed away from the cage, shaking hand pressed to her cheek.
“The man’s insane,” she muttered and looked around abruptly at the silent house.
Then Les had turned too and both of them were suddenly aware of the man in the house who had told them to go and look at his zoo.
“Les, what are we going to do?” Marian’s voice shook with rising hysteria.
Les felt numb, devoured by the impact of what they’d seen. For a long moment he could only stand shivering and stare at his wife, feeling immersed in some fantastic dream.
Then his lips jammed together and the heat seemed to flood over him.
“Let’s get out of here,” he snapped and grabbed her hand.
The only sound was their harsh panting and the quick step of Marian’s sandals on the hard ground. The air throbbed with intense heat, smothering their breath, making perspiration break out heavily across their faces and bodies.
“Faster,” Les gasped, tugging at her hands.
Then, as they turned the edge of the house, they both recoiled with a violent contracting of muscles.
“No!” Marian’s cry contorted her face into a twisted mask of terror.
The man stood between them and their car, a long double-barreled shotgun leveled at them.
Les didn’t know why the idea flooded through his brain. But, suddenly, he realized that no one knew where he and Marian were, no one could even know where to begin searching for them. In rising panic, he thought of the man asking them where they were going, he thought of the man looking down at their California license plate.
And he heard the man, the hard, emotionless voice of the man.
“Now go on back,” the man said, “to the zoo.”
After he’d locked the couple in one of the cages, Merv Ketter walked slowly back to the house, the heavy shotgun pulling down his right arm. He’d felt no pleasure in the act, only a draining relief that had, for a moment, loosened the tightness in his body. But, already, the tightness was returning. It never went away for more than the few minutes it took him to trap another person and cage him.
If anything, the tightness was worse now. This was the first time he’d ever put a woman in one of his cages. The knowledge twisted a cold knot of despair in his chest. A woman—he’d put a woman in his cage. His chest shuddered with harsh breath as he ascended the rickety steps of the back porch.
Then, as the screen door slapped shut behind him, his long mouth tightened. Well, what was he supposed to do? He slammed the shotgun down on the yellow oil-clothed surface of the kitchen table, another forced breath wracking his chest. What else could I do—he argued with himself. His boots clacked sharply across the worn linoleum as he walked to the quiet, sunlanced living room.
Dust rose from the old arm chair as he dropped down heavily, spiritlessly. What was he supposed to do? He’d had no choice.
For the thousandth time, he looked down at his left forearm, at the slight reddish bulge just under the elbow joint. Inside his flesh, the tiny metal cone was still humming delicately. He knew it without listening. It never stopped.
He slumped back exhaustedly with a groan and lay his head on the high back of the chair. His eyes stared dully across the room, through the long slanting bar of sunlight quivering with dust motes. At the mantelpiece.
The Mauser rifle—he stared at it. The Luger, the bazooka shell, the hand grenade, all of them still active. Vaguely, through his tormented brain, curled the idea of putting the Luger to his temple, holding the Mauser against his side, even of pulling out the pin and holding the grenade against his stomach.
War hero. The phrase scraped cruelly at his mind. It had long lost its meaning, its comfort. Once, it had meant something to him to be a medaled warrior, ribboned, lauded, admired.
Then Elsie had died, then the battles and the pride were gone. He was alone in the desert with his trophies and with nothing else.
And then one day he’d gone into the desert to hunt.
His eyes shut, his leathery throat moved convulsively. What was the use of thinking, of regretting? The will to live was still in him. Maybe it was a stupid, a pointless will but it was there just the same; he couldn’t rid himself of it. Not after two men were gone, not after five, no, not even after seven men were gone.
The dirt-filled nails dug remorselessly into his palms until they broke the skin. But a woman, a woman. The thought knifed at him. He’d never planned on caging a woman.
One tight fist drove down in futile rage on his leg. He couldn’t help it. Sure, he’d seen the California plate. But he wasn’t going to do it. Then the woman had asked for water and he suddenly had known that he had no choice, he had to do it.
There were only two men left.
And he’d found out that the couple was going to New York and the tension had come and gone, loosened and tightened in a spastic rhythm as he knew, in his very flesh, that he was going to tell them to come and look at his zoo.
I should have given them an injection, he thought. They might start screaming. It didn’t matter about the man, he was used to men screaming. But a woman …
Merv Ketter opened his eyes and stared with hopeless eyes at the mantelpiece, at the picture of his dead wife, at the weapons which had been his glory and now were meaningless—steel and wood without worth, without substance.
Hero.
The word made his stomach turn.
The glutinous pulsing slowed, paused a moment’s fraction, then began again, filling the inner shell with its hissing, spumous sound. A flaccid wave of agitation rippled down along the rows of muscle coils. The being stirred. It was time.
Thought. The shapeless, gauzelike airbubble, coalesced; surrounded. The being moved, an undulation, a gelatinous worming within the shimmering bubble. A bumping, a slithering, a rocking flow of viscous tissues.
Thought again—a wave directing. The hiss of entering atmosphere, the soundless swinging of metal. Open. Shutting with a click. Sunset blood edged the horizon. A slow and
noiseless sinking in the air, a colorless balloon filled with something formless, something alive.
Earth, cooling. The being touched it, settled. It moved across the ground and every living thing fled its scouring approach. In its ropy wake, the ground was left a green and yellow iridescence.
“Look out.”
Marian’s sudden whisper almost made him drop the nail file. He jerked back his hand, his sweat-grimed cheek twitching and drew back quickly into the shadows. The sun was almost down.
“Is he coming this way?” Marian asked, her voice husky with dryness.
“I don’t know.” He stood tensely, watching the overalled man approach, hearing the fast crunch of his boot heels on the baked ground. He tried to swallow but all the moisture in him had been blotted up by the afternoon heat and only a futile clicking sounded in his throat. He was thinking about the man seeing the deeply filed slit in the window bar.
The man in the Stetson walked quickly, his face blank and hard, his hands swinging in tense little arcs at his sides.
“What’s he going to do?” Marian’s voice rasped nervously, her physical discomfort forgotten in the sudden return of fear.
Les only shook his head. All afternoon he’d been asking himself the same question. After they’d been locked up, after the man had gone back to his house, during the first terrifying minutes and for the rest of the time when Marian had found the nail file in the pocket of her shorts and shapeless panic had gained the form of hoping for escape. All during that time the question had plagued him endlessly. What was the man going to do with them?
But it wasn’t their cage the man was headed for. A loosening of relief made them both go slack. The man hadn’t even looked toward the cage they were in. He seemed to avoid looking toward it.
Then the man had passed out of their sight and they heard the sound of him unlocking one of the cages. The squeaking rasp of the rusty door hinges made Les’s stomach muscles draw taut.
The man appeared again.
Marian caught her breath. They both stared at the unconscious man being dragged across the ground, his heels raking narrow gouges in the dust.