Читать книгу Behind the Moon - Madison Smartt Bell - Страница 28

When she turned from the blaze of white light in the tent door, Jamal was there behind her, spot-lit, his skinny arms outstretched and his face blanched to a featureless pallor by the blast of illumination. Had he herded her, manipulated her into this place?

“You—” she said, “You—” The blur of his face resolved as she came nearer, but she couldn’t think what to put behind that You—accusation, endearment, curse? The light went out suddenly, and for a second or two Julie couldn’t see anything at all, then forms begin to pick themselves out of the darkness, blue-black sky outlining the cliff, the silvery shapes of the bikes where they were parked. And nearer, Jamal’s spidery silhouette, an arm reaching toward her, and she thrust out her hand, to deflect him, or to grasp—she didn’t really know which. Their fingertips barely brushed as she rushed by, and that contact tingled, shimmered like a déjà vu. Go, Jamal hissed—she was already past him now.

Jamal had turned back toward the tent. “Just let her go, Marko.” And Julie was thinking that he meant her to escape from the situation altogether, but how? She didn’t even know how to start Jamal’s little scooter, the only one of the three bikes she might have been strong enough to manage, and it could never outrun the Harleys anyway, and they were out on the empty desert with nowhere to hide, unless she went up the same way on the ledges around to the other side of the cliff, where the hawk had been that afternoon—

“Too late,” Marko’s voice was reasonably calm, a reasonable tone stretched over strain. “She’s in this far, look it, she’s got to come all the way.”

Julie turned back. Jamal had rooted himself in the sand, knees bent and his feet set apart. Marko crouched in the mouth of the tent, holding a flashlight now, with a softer beam than the spot on the camera, the light stain fading as it spread across the sand behind Jamal’s boots.

“Julie’s not in this.” Jamal said. “She never was.”

“If that’s how you feel,” Marko said, “you dumb-ass sandnigger, all you had to do was keep her away.”

Then Marko’s attention moved to her, though Julie wasn’t sure that he could see her where she hesitated, high on the balls of her feet, a little beyond where the pool of flashlight failed. “Come back, Jule—we’re not gonna hurtcha! It’s all. . . . It feels good, once you get into it, y’know, like Karyn is.”

Something in that scared Julie a lot more than she had been scared before and the run impulse was shooting up her legs, erupting in her spine, and still somehow she was frozen in place, transfixed by Marko’s wolverine eyes, if he could actually even see her, when Jamal was blocking most of the light. Then Marko suddenly charged up out of his crouch, raising the flashlight like a club, and it was one of those six-D-cell maglites like the cops used, too, but Jamal went down on one knee and as Marko rushed him he tossed a palm’s worth of sand into Marko’s face, and that broke the momentum. Marko dropped the light and covered his eye-sockets with both hands, calling out blindly, you stinking camel-fucker, I’ll kill you when I catch you, you—

Julie ran. All she could hear was Karyn screaming, the two-note scream that switched itself on at ball-games or car wrecks or concerts or if Karyn saw a snake—it just kept on going like a siren or a car alarm till something shut it off. She reached the cliff and scrambled up the ledges, tripping and crouching, using her hands. Her eyes had recovered from the spotlight blast, and now she could see well enough in the feathery light of the moon, but she supposed the others could see her too.