A Question Of Time, Fred Saberhagen [best fiction books to read .TXT] 📗

would have time to drill deepened in the limestone. Somehow the sun had passed the zenith and was going down. Despite oddness of the way time was passing, and the urgency of passing time, he had to pause frequently to rest his arms.

      He didn’t look into the cave again, but with the wind blowing the last traces of smoke away he knew that now the fire was out. Whatever damage the burning kerosene was capable of doing had been done, and their enemy had somehow survived it.

      “Jake, I’m sorry, lover. I’ll help you now, I’ll help.” Camilla had pulled herself together and come back to stand beside him.

      Jake nodded and smiled, saving his breath for work. He put down his hammer for a moment, leaning against the barrier rock to rest, wiping sweat from his forehead, and from his face, long days unshaven, with the sleeve of his work shirt.

      Camilla came to give him an embrace.

      Without warning, Tyrrell’s scorched hand came groping out of the recess, after his tormentors. The thin limb struck like a black snake wearing the ashen remnants of a sleeve, the arm extending itself unbelievably far. The grab missed Jake’s arm by a fraction of an inch, and caught Camilla by the collar of her shirt.

      Jake let out an incoherent sound of horror, dropped his hammer and jumped back. But the vampire’s groping hand had now fastened on Camilla—she was being dragged helplessly into the small aperture between two unyielding surfaces of rock. The sound she made now was less a scream than a prolonged sob.

      Jake stepped forward again. He picked up the metal drill, half as long as a baseball bat, and heavier, and swung it directly against Tyrrell’s almost skeletal wrist—to no effect. The sensation of impact that traveled back up the drill and into Jake’s own hands was as if he had struck the massive rock itself. The blackened hand did not release its grip.

      Camilla’s body was braced, all her muscles straining as she struggled to keep herself from being forced, crushed, into the narrow aperture. Her sobbing made coherent words: “No, Jake, use wood! Use wood!”

      Jake dropped the drill. He grabbed up the longest hammer, and tried pounding with the handle at Tyrrell’s arm. When that had no effect he changed his tactics, using the handle like a lever, jamming it into the narrow crevice between rocks, making a fulcrum one angle of the big rock slab. With all his strength he forced Tyrrell’s burned wrist against another rock.

      Once more, the man in the cave screamed horribly.

      His blackened, bony fingers still refused to release Camilla’s collar, but now the fabric of the shirt was ripping.

      Part of the garment, collar and shoulder and sleeve, tore completely away. With a final cry, as if she might be dying, the young woman fell to the ground, out of the vampire’s reach.

      Jake grabbed her under the arms, pulled her even farther from the blackened arm that still groped in search of breathing flesh.

* * *

      “Come on, Cam, we’re not done yet. Come on, you’ve still got to help me. We still have to drill another hole.” It would have to be done, obviously, in a place where Tyrrell could not possibly reach them as they worked.

      “All right.” Camilla dragged herself back to her feet.

      They worked, in a nightmare of heat and exhaustion, in a persistent numbing stench of kerosene, while the treacherous sun slid swiftly down the sky. Sometimes, from the corners of their eyes, they saw one of Tyrrell’s ruined arms come groping desperately out again.

      There came a time when Jake had to rest. Camilla, now almost wholly recovered as far as he could tell, brought him food while he rested.

      At last Jake, measuring with the drill, decided that the final hole was deep enough to hold a charge.

      Once more, with shaking fingers, he crimped high explosives and blasting caps together, along with one end of a length of wire.

      “Hurry, hurry.” Camilla, in a shaking whisper, had begun to chant a litany.

      It seemed to Jake that time was going crazy. How could a full day of sunlight have slipped away so quickly? Shadows were lengthening, the hours of daylight almost gone.

      Inside the cave, darkness was firmly re-established, and the man in there had ceased to struggle visibly. He had fallen completely silent.

* * *

      Eventually, with the two breathers huddled in the same shelter as before, Jake managed to set off a second blast.

      Running out from his shelter as before, amid a shower of splintered rock, he needed only a single glance at the barrier to know that he had failed again. Once again a thick slice of the obstacle had been blasted away, but the main bulk still stood. Maybe one more shot would do it. Maybe.

      Fatalistically Jake surveyed his inventory of tools and blasting materials. Even if he had the stuff for a third blast, which was doubtful, he lacked anything like the time to prepare one.

      Dragging Camilla to her feet, he started moving with her, an exhausted shuffle down-canyon in the direction of the river. “Come on,” he urged.

      “Where, Jake? Where?”

      He kept his mouth shut. He didn’t want to say anything, for fear that the half-dead thing still living in the little cave might hear him.

      Dragging, half-carrying Camilla with him, Jake made the best time he could, down the trail to the river.

      All along he had had in the back of his mind this final try at escape, something to do when all else failed. If they could get to the river there was a chance they might survive the rapids. And now there was a chance that Tyrrell, injured as he was, would not be able to pursue them past that barrier, or could not catch them if he did. If the rapids killed them, well, any quick death would be better than what was coming for them here at sundown.

      Leaping freely beside Jake as he stumbled along, too weak to run, the foaming water of the little