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  If he lay back down, though, he knew he wouldn't be able to get up again. He'd just have to lie there and wait for somebody to come, for anything, just hoping that the guy with the truck hadn't been lying to him, hadn't already forgotten about him.

  He leaned against the counter for a few more minutes, gathering his strength.

  The stairs were only a couple of yards away. He could push the chair that far, and then lunge for the curved wooden banister. A ball in an eagle's claw-he recognized that from the dream. If he could manage to keep hold of the rail, he'd be able to stay upright.

  He pushed himself away from the counter, sliding the chair across the floor, a few inches with each dragging step, like an old woman with a chrome walker-he could see a picture of himself inside his head, creeping along.

  The chair's legs bumped against the bottom stair. He leaned farther over, reaching for the banister. His weight went too far to the side, and the chair suddenly skittered out from under him, toppling onto its side. His good hand gripped the rail, squeezing the dust-covered wood tight. His knees sagged, but he managed to keep his legs under him.

  The strain of reaching had torn something loose under the bandages. He looked down and saw a line of red seeping from under the cloth and trickling down his skin to the waistband of his jeans.

  Tilting his head back, he could see above him a window at the landing where the stairs turned. The glass wasn't boarded up like the ones all around the ground floor lobby. Bright sunlight poured through and washed down the stairs.

  He pulled himself toward the light. Every two or three steps he had to stop and let his heart ease down from hammering against his breastbone.

  The rail ended at the landing. He leaned against the wall and looked out the window. The glass was clouded with dust, but he could still see low hills, the sun pressing down on the dry brown scrub. The empty landscape rolled on toward the horizon and a distant blue-gray range of mountains without interruption.

  He worked himself around, hands pressed against the window's frame, to where the stairs continued.

  The black spots were dancing in front of his eyes again by the time he reached the end of the stairs. Panting for breath, the back of his head against the wall, he saw another piece of his dreaming: the corridor, the numbered doors, one after another. The narrow space was dark, lit only by the one window at the end.

  That was where he'd looked out, in the dream; he remembered it. The glass was broken out, one triangular shard hanging from the top. He didn't have to go to it-in the dream, he'd been able to walk instead of crawling and creeping-to know he'd see nothing from it. The party on the lawn, the women in their high-breasted dresses, the young one with the badminton racquet-they were all gone. Long ago. Now there were just the dead hills, baked to stone.

  He moved in the other direction, sliding his shoulder against the wall, the way the nurse in the dream had led him.

  The gold letters had chipped off the pebbled glass. He could only make out "xamin" and "oom" on the door at the other end of the corridor. The rusted knob turned in his hand, the hinges scraping as he pushed the door inward.

  More pieces of the dream. Battered by time, like everything in the building. The cabinet doors sagged open, I the blue glass bottles with their hand-written labels now broken or tipped on their sides, gummy black tar leaking through their corks and making dark trails down the white-painted wood. The antique X-ray machine looked like the carapace of some giant insect, huddled in a corner and dried to a hollow shell.

  He leaned against the examining table; it creaked under his weight, as though the rust-specked metal legs might split apart. His forehead bumped against the lamp, and it swayed away on its spidery articulated arm. Something snapped in the wheeled base, and the lamp toppled over, crashing to the floor. Bright splinters of the bulb inside scattered through the rising dust.

  A counter underneath the cabinets was close enough to reach. He picked up a scalpel from a tray and brought it up to his face. For a moment, the end of the dream, all that he could remember of it, moved inside his head. The blade had been perfect and shining then, a mirror that he'd been able to see his face in, until it had been too close, pressing its fine edge into the skin under his eye. His breath stopped, trapped behind a stone in his chest.

  The scalpel in his hand was dulled with rust, scabbed over with orange and brown. He dropped it, and it clattered against the other ancient tools on the metal tray.

  He leaned across the examining table, his forearm flat against its frayed padding, his head below his hunched shoulders. The dream had been another world, separate from this decay. It wasn't here now.

  This was where they had left him. Aitch and Charlie. In this dead place.

  With a sudden cry of anger, he lurched over the table, his good hand smashing across the rows of bottles on the cabinet shelves. They scattered and burst against the floor, the pungent odors filling the air with rot and age.

  The swing of his arm sent him sprawling to the floor, the impact setting off a burst of fire behind his eyes. His hand clawed through the broken glass, digging into the wood beneath, slippery with the blood from his palm.

  His legs weren't strong enough to get him upright again. He made it as far as the head of the stairs, dragging his useless arm, the back of his hand smearing through the dust.

  The stairs blurred and spun, a hole deepening before him. The black spots swarmed up his face, became one, bigger than the light and the walls and the floor. The last of his strength bled out of him, and he crumpled forward, falling.

  He didn't feel it when he hit. There was nothing left to feel.

  SIX

  The red eyes watched the building. The sun's heat, even this early in the morning, battered the hills; the watching animals stayed in their shaded burrows, the cool spaces beneath the rocks, and waited.

  The scent of a hurt thing was in the air, the smell of blood, dried to a black crust, and fresh, still wet. The fine trace, a thread in the air, drifted out of the building; different from the aged, layered smells of dust and splintering wood.

  Different now, but the same as what had been there before. The ones in the hills, waiting through the long brilliant hours for night, knew what it was. They remembered. The building had been full of that smell once, of hurt things, and then things that stopped hurting. And became something else.

  That had been a glorious time. If they'd had words to speak, they would have said it of that time, handing the memory around to each other like a golden coin worn smooth by each one's touch, over and over.

  They had no words.

  They could only watch and wait, in their cool shaded places. A hurt thing was in that place, where hurt things had been before, and hadn't been for a long time-too long a time. The other hunger, the one that wasn't in their bellies, stirred and moved, awakened.

  One raised its muzzle and drew in the hot, laden air. The scent was still there, red and clear. The hurt thing hadn't died, not yet.

  Later, in the dark, they would come down from the hills and drink in the scent, the sharp points of their muzzles pressed close to the boarded-over windows and doors. They would circle around the building, ears pricked, every sense trembling. In their own silence…

  Now they waited, for the sun's time to pass.

  ***

  The sound of the motorbike's two-stroke engine spattered against the hills and bounced off. It sounded, even at a distance, like a string of firecrackers going off inside an empty metal trash can. A continuous mechanical fart-that was what one of Doot's English teachers, the little snippy one that everybody figured was a homo, had called it, after hearing it rasping around in front of the high school.

  He didn't give a shit what that guy, or anybody else, said about the bike; it got him where he wanted to go. A car would've been better-he was already saving up money for that-but in the meantime, the buzzing little mongrel beat walking. A person could fry his fucking brains out, trying to walk from one place to another out here. Big sp
aces, and nothing in between. That was the high desert for you.

  Still, when there wasn't anybody around giving you shit, it was kinda nice. Doot's father, when he'd told him what was going on and what he wanted him to do, had said that he should get an early start, knowing that the bike had a top speed that only beat a slow trot because it could keep it up longer. So when he'd heard his dad's truck pulling out, before the first light, he'd already been awake and drawing on his jeans and T-shirt. And he had been on the road, with the stuff his dad had told him to pack, when the hills were all red with the sun coming up, the air still smelling like night, cool in the lungs, and unbroken by any human sound. He'd fired up the bike with regret; if he could've gotten to where he had to go by walking, with the food and the water and the other things in a backpack, he would've done it that way. The bike's engine had sawed apart the quiet, and it wouldn't come back together again until nightfall.

  The road cut straight across the landscape, low brush on either side. He hadn't bothered putting on his helmet, leaving it strapped to the bike's frame. Out here, the world was so flat that he could see miles off anything that might give him trouble. Like one of the shit-for-brains types from the high school, horsing around with his daddy's pickup truck. He'd already taken a bad spill in the center of town, the one spot where there was an actual traffic light-not that the rednecks around here paid any attention to it. That Garza fellow, who should've graduated a couple of years ago and was still hanging around looking for trouble and finding it, and one of his buddies from the county correctional farm had pretty much taken dead aim at him, laughing and pounding their beer cans against the dashboard as they'd come barreling around the corner. He'd had to dump the bike to get out of their way-the pickup had gone right over the bike without touching it, thank you, God-and he'd gotten up without anything worse than a bleeding road rash underneath the left sleeve of his denim jacket. Those fuckers had just headed on out of town, braying away and tossing the empties out the side windows.

  That was a big reason it was so pleasant out here. The absence of assholes. As long as he kept an eye open for potholes gouged out by the winter's snow and ice, it was clear sailing.

  The building, the old clinic, showed up ahead, still a couple of miles away. It looked like the stump of a broken tooth, dirty white except for the blackened part to the side where the fire had been. A faint sulfurous smell moved in the wind, like duck eggs that had been laid in a barn and then forgotten until a pitchfork had broken them open in the old straw. Behind the clinic building, the first set of low hills interrupted the flat terrain.

  A lane curved off the county road, leading to the clinic. The tires of the motorbike bumped over the rusting metal of the rail line that had run out here, ages ago. Brown weeds bristled up from between the ties. A stagnant-looking pond, the surface coated with swirls that reflected oily rainbows, stretched to the right, with one of the clinic's outbuildings, a little stucco hut, at its edge.

  Doot halted the motorbike halfway down the lane. From here, he could see the boarded-over windows all along the ground floor, the shingles of the covered verandah sagging or broken through to the planks beneath. Up at the top of the building, braced by a framework of iron grown fragile, big letters spelled out THERMALEN. There had been another E at the end. but it had fallen off in a windstorm and now lay facedown near the steps going up to the building's front doors, stenciling itself into the dry weeds.

  The bike's racket snapped back from the looming front of the building, the echo fluttering at his ears. He walked the bike through the deepest rut in the lane, then lifted his feet to the pegs and rolled on a touch of the accelerator.

  When he got off the bike, pushing down the kick-stand, he combed his hair back into place-or close to-with his fingers. Tooling around without the helmet always left him looking like he had yellow straw sticking straight up from his forehead; with the helmet on, and sweating into it, made him look as though the straw had been glued all over his skull.

  The hills' silence wrapped around him, now that the bike's engine was shut off. He glanced over his shoulder as he untied the bundle from the carrier rack. The blank windows in the stories above stared down at him.

  "Shit." The hook at the end of the bungee cord had snagged his fingertip; he hadn't been watching what he was doing. A drop of blood oozed up. He stuck the finger in his mouth for a moment, then shook it dry. Another drop seeped out, smaller than the first. That would have to do for now. He lifted the pack's strap onto his shoulder and mounted the buckling steps up to the clinic's door.

  "Hey-anybody here?" He squeezed his chest past the boards and looked around what had been the clinic's lobby. It was a dumb thing to say-as if the guy could have gone off somewhere, the way his dad had said he was all busted up-but he didn't know what else would've been appropriate. He didn't want to just burst in on the guy. Maybe I should have knocked. That was a dumb enough idea to be a joke.

  He pushed the boards farther back, so he could work his way in with the bundle. His dad had been the one who'd pulled loose most of the rusted nails around the door's frame, leaving just a couple at the top and bottom that could be wiggled back into their orange-rimmed holes. So that anybody who came along wouldn't think people had been going in and out of that place. That had been a long time ago, too-he'd been only ten or so when his dad, right after the divorce, had gone through a phase with a metal detector. A buddy had laid it on him as partial payment for helping him out with a load of cauliflower that had broken down on the pass through the Blue Mountains. His dad had been working a reefer truck back then, making good enough money that he had been more interested in dumb toys than cash.

  Seeing the lobby again, with its raggedy curtains and the mahogany and marble counter at the far end. busted-off pieces and all. set a little movie ticking away inside his head. Him and his dad. the round flat snout of the metal detector sniffing at the floor, his dad watching the dial on the box up at the top. He'd tagged behind him, keeping a carefully calculated distance to show that he wasn't really worried about any horrible shit happening, like ghosts or hoboes-either or both-raving down the big staircase with knives and hard-ons. The older kids in school had told him back then that that was what 'boes did to you, if they caught you snooping around where they had their fires and did all the rest of their hobo business. The knife up to your throat while they pulled down your pants with their other dirty, black-nailed hand. Ghosts he hadn't been so sure about back then, as a kid. Could ghosts get hard-ons? Something poking up under the white sheet, like a pup tent?

  That showed how long ago he'd been a kid. Nowadays, kids that young didn't know from ghosts in white sheets. Now they wore hockey goalie masks and had chain saws and knives on the ends of their fingers and shit. And even the little kids laughed their asses off, or said "Wow, gnarly" at stuff like that when they watched them on their folks' VCRs. That was the way things went. It made him feel old to think about it already, and he was just goddamn seventeen.

  The smell of the musty air inside the building, cooped up and baked by long days of sun-he remembered that, too. And dust motes drifting in and out of the thin slices of light coming through the window boards. And the quiet.

  He and his dad hadn't found any treasure with the metal detector. Now that he'd thought about it, he'd realized his old man hadn't really been expecting to but had just been in some goofy screwing-around mode. The only thing had been a silver dollar, an old Standing Liberty cartwheel that had fallen down in a crack between the floorboards, and that his dad had pried out with his jack-knife blade and given to him. It was under his clean socks now, in a drawer of his bedroom dresser, back home. They had never come back out to the place, after that one time.

  "Hey," he called again; nobody had answered him from before. Maybe the guy was asleep, or passed out still. Or dead-his old man had told him the guy looked pretty close to it. Being in this place with some fuckin' corpse wasn't an idea he wanted to think about. "You here? Come on, man."

 
Silence. His eyes had adjusted enough to the dim light that he could see a couple of blankets, a deflated ghost, crumpled in the middle of the lobby's floor. He recognized them as the ones his dad usually kept in the Peterbilt's sleeper. That was probably his dad's thermos beside them; he'd said something about leaving the guy some water.

  Well, shit… Doot walked farther into the lobby, looking around him. The guy wasn't here. Maybe he'd crawled outside. And pounded the nails back in that held the boards over the door? Not likely.

  He stood by the counter that had been the old clinic's reception desk. There were marks, like somebody had dragged his arm through the dust on the marble top, and one clear handprint.

  "Just tell me where you're at, okay?" He raised his eyes, listening to his voice bounce off the carved, interlocking beams of the ceiling. He held his breath; when the echo faded, he heard the other sound. Someone else breathing.

  Around the end of the counter, Doot saw him. The guy was sprawled out on the landing up the big staircase, shoulder and head against the wall, one hand flopped down the steps. Blood leaked through the bandages wrapped around the guy's chest.

  The guy moaned when he raised him up. Doot squatted on the stairs below him, trying to get the weight onto his own shoulders. It flashed on him then that maybe he was fucking it up, maybe the guy had one of those injuries where if you tried to move him, you'd just killed him right there on the spot. But it was already too late; he'd got the guy up into a fireman's carry, or as much of one as he could manage-the guy seemed to weigh a ton, all loose and uncooperative like that-and had already stumbled with him down to the lobby. Besides, he didn't see how he could have left him all bent up like a rag doll on the landing.

  He dragged the guy over to the blankets and lay him down. The eyes fluttered open as he stood back up; they drifted, then fastened on his face.