Ralph Compton Death Valley Drifter

CHAPTER ONE

Damn you. . . . Damn . . .

Those were the last words he remembered. They were the only words he remembered. The man came to lying on his chest, knowing nothing more except that he was alive.

That much was plain anyway. It was not memory.

As he became dimly aware of his surroundings, and the thick black night in his head became too bright day, he realized he did not actually remember anything more than those words. He did try to answer the involuntary first question, Where am I? He knit his forehead. As his mind struggled to get its footing, he found himself wondering: What am I doing here?

The question was brusquely shoved aside by a hard, angry pulsing throughout the entirety of his skull. He asked himself, Have I been drinking?

He did not know. Like the sweat that permeated his skin, some insistent and rational piece of him pushed to the fore.

One puzzle at a time.

The man opened his eyes to slits and fought through the pain in his head to have a think about what he did know. It was day. He saw blurry yellow-white ahead of him, felt the sun on his back and left cheek, on the backs of his bare arms. He was aware of grit along the outsides of his gums. And his head hurt worse for the effort of just letting in the light. He knew that, too.

The man's face was lying on its right cheek. When he found the strength to inhale deeply, he also found that there was sand in his nose. His nostrils were partly lying in it. He made a valiant attempt to snort out the grit, mostly succeeding after three tries; then he tried to raise his face. The sand clung like pepper on a fish. That was no concern. What was: The instant he moved, the right side of his head kicked as though there was a bronc in his skull trying hard and regular to get out. The man dropped back into the hot, dry sand. As consciousness returned more fully, he realized that his back burned. His chest did, too, because the hot sand clung there, too, stuck in every pore from his exposed waist to his neck. There was something crawling inside his ear, too small to be a scorpion-probably a fly. He shook his head a little, and it buzzed away with noisy protest.

You remember bugs, he thought, able to visualize them.

The man's fingers were lying beside his thighs. They were swollen from the heat. He felt along his legs. They were not bare, though he had no idea why he was wearing just long, sweat-soaked underwear bottoms. Worse than that, even as his head cleared and he could picture garments and feel textures, he still had no idea where he was or how he had gotten here. And as the man started to think, he realized one thing more.

He had no idea who he was.

He thought hard. What little he remembered-from when, he also had no idea-came when he used his tongue to try to spit out more sand.

A picnic lunch. A sunny beach. Sand in the food. But-was that recently?

He knew what he felt, and also what he smelled and heard-both, nothing. Not a horse, which surprised him. It was time to see. When he finally opened his eyes, they instantly smarted from the sun, which was white and washed-out. But at least he could see the daylight, the sand, and a bit of scrub. When he closed them, all he could see were shadows of a horizon and the foliage against ruddy eyelids. Nothing else appeared to him, not even what he looked like. There was just a deep black well without a bottom or a reflection.

As time passed-perhaps minutes, maybe only seconds; pain had its own way of measuring things-he gave some attention to the sweat that greased his body. It was thick and heating his outsides to near broiling, sucking all the moisture from inside. Moving his mouth, he realized it was not only sandy, but he could not clear it because his tongue was too dry to try to spit. And then, as he slowly raised a hand to where his head hurt-the plumped hand seemed to weigh as much as an iron mallet-he became aware that not all the moisture on his scalp was perspiration.

There was a sticky patch of blood clinging to his hair like morning dew in hell. His fat, shaking fingers spider-walked along the thin trail that ran from the top of his head to deep behind his right ear.

The man's fingertips crept back in the other direction along his scalp, and he let out a raspy yelp of pain as he found the open wound toward the front of his crown. At first he wondered if he had somehow survived a scalping-how did he remember what that was, but not his name?-until his crablike exploration found just a gash in the hair wide and damned painful but not very deep.

He had been struck. He remembered a lightning flash behind both eyes. And right before that, before he swore-

A figure indistinct in the dark. Very near with a six-shooter in his hand.

The figure was not shooting. But he was coming toward the man. He remembered, suddenly, his own horse, dark brown with a blond mane. He must have been riding swiftly, since the animal was breathing heavily. Everything else about the animal-saddle, gear, what weapon he might have been carrying-he could not picture or recall. Or what he had been doing right before that. Or why. Or where. It must have been something in this desert, though he could not picture anything.

Well, a companion and a horse-that's something, he thought. Was the horse nearby? He would have to open his eyes and get off the damned ground to find out.

Mustering his energy was almost as difficult as trying to remember things. Rising came in jagged spurts, like a marionette being lifted by its strings. It happened with great effort and initially generated little progress. The man dragged his arms from his sides, all stiff and unhelpful joints below the shoulders. He finally planted his palms on the ground, inhaled, and pushed up. Sand clung to half his face as it was lifted from the scalding, sweat-dampened ground. There was a blade of grass stuck to his lower lip, held there as if it were peeling skin. His arms shook, but he locked the elbows. His head screamed, but his mouth was too parched to give the pain more than raw, airy voice. A weak hiss escaped his throat, and then he settled into the rhythm of the pain. He closed his dirty, blistered lips and breathed through his nose, painfully sneezing out the dirt. He lost strength for a moment and fell down, plunking his chin on the sand to support the weight of his aching head. He feared that if he gave up now, he would never get up. He pushed up again.

The grass and some of the sand had come free, his exposed skin baking under the sun. His elbows locked again, and he remained upright. It took a moment for his dry eyes to focus, longer to adjust to the brilliant daylight.

The man did not like what those hurting eyes settled on.

There was an ugly rusty shape about two feet in front of him. It was a scorpion. He knew that it was a danger. But even a horse would know that much. Fortunately, the devilish-looking thing seemed as unmotivated as he was in the white sunlight. Nonetheless, it was best to get away. Pressing his palms to the hot ground and having more reason to get up than he had a moment before, the man rose slowly.

He grunted, his head hammering angrily, but at least his arm and back muscles did not complain much. Breath came without pain. He could not have been here long enough for them to have stiffened, he decided. With effort, he got onto his knees, hovered there until he was steady, then looked around.

There was nothing to hold on to. No tree-and no horse. That was concerning.

"You . . . better . . . get . . . up," he muttered dryly.

His tortured voice and pronunciation were not familiar to him.

The man got his bare feet under him one at a time. Sand shook from his chest and arms. He locked his knees and stood. His head argued against rising and then being upright, but he remained like a newborn foal, shifting balance from side to side and accepting that here he was. The pain made him feel nauseous, but there did not seem to be anything in his belly to regurgitate.

You didn't have time or vittles to eat, he thought. Or both.

Only when the man was sure of his footing did he back away from the scorpion-which seemed, by its stillness, utterly uninterested in him. For all he knew, it was dead. Now that he could see more of his surroundings, he noticed a tarantula nearby. The brown-haired thing was on its back, its legs curled inward. It appeared dead. Maybe the two predators had struggled, the scorpion winning the fight but losing the war. It could be they had never even met, had been scuttling just out of range. Perhaps the spider had failed to find shade or water or whatever it was that a spider required.

Thinking of water reminded him of his own intense thirst. He stepped onto a patch of brown grass to protect the burning soles of his feet. Sweat trickled here and there, mostly old perspiration relocated by his rising.

The man saw nothing but sand and spotty scrub ahead. He did not detect the faint but discernible smell or feel of open water anywhere nearby. That, too, he suspected, was as much an animal sense as a remembered one. He turned his head slowly, looking around. He was on a desert, a dusty plain that was flat in all directions but one. That exception was to his right-the north or thereabout, according to the position of the rising sun. There were hills about a quarter mile in that direction, with bent-over grass and little more. There were cacti, too, but they would be of no help. He recalled that the pulpy interior provided unpleasant water and the unpleasant aftereffect of diarrhea.

That was not instinct. That was something he remembered. He could even taste the damp, sour mush in his mouth.

Blood globbed into his ear, running hot and thick from his scalp. He raised an arm, unsteady with weakness, and scooped the moisture out with a dust-covered finger. He absently wiped it on his underwear.

No horse. No shoes or boots.

How the hell did I get here?

He struggled to recall, grew frustrated by running into a wall of nothing. He snorted the last of the sand from his nostrils. He flexed his bloated fingers.

Getting angry was not going to help him. Getting his bearings might. He squinted up into a featureless blue sky without even a passing cloud to offer respite. From the position of the sun, he made it not just morning but early morning. He could not have been lying here very long. With all the nocturnal predators that came out at sundown, he did not think he would have survived the night with a bleeding wound. Besides, if he had been lying there all night injured, he probably would have bled more. Possibly to death.

Whoever had done this, whomever he was talking with or cursing at, had not meant to kill him but might have been content to let death come. Otherwise, they would have finished him. A gun-too noisy? Were there others around? Just a second blow might have done it, might have left him here to bake to death.

The blood had not gone hard close by the wound-that was another clue to it being recent. He guessed that it was the heat of the sun that had roused him. Perhaps by design of the attacker? A good thing it had, too. Staying unconscious in the heat was a certain way to perspire to death or suffer- What did they call it?

Sunstroke.

Even with all those legs, the tarantula and the scorpion could not outrun the scalding lash of the sun.

So it was not intended to be a fatal wound. Then why was he here? And at night in the dark.

The man decided to look more closely at the ground for tracks. If he'd had a horse, there would be something.

He looked around on the ground . . . and swore. There was a very slight breeze, hot so that it had seemed like the sun, but it wasn't. It was enough to have blown sand over any footprints or hoofprints that might have been left behind.

There was no time to search around. Detective work was a luxury he could not afford. If he did not find water, he would die. Whoever had hit him had not left any behind. That argued against charity-

Or else there is water somewhere around.

The man exhaled and took a moment, his eyes scrunched against the unyielding sun, searching his mule-stubborn memory for any missing pieces. Like where he was headed. Should he go forward . . . or back, into the desert? Perhaps there was a campsite.

He closed his mouth, set in his determination to recall something, anything. His inclination was to head toward the hills in the south but he had to be sure. If he picked wrong-

Shutting his dry mouth, inhaling, exhaling, he noticed a distinctive smell in his nose-

A campfire.

He turned around haltingly, his first steps, and faced in the direction opposite from the way he had been lying. There was nothing. Not the remnants of a fire, nor a stick or a rock covered with blood. He had not fallen.

A gun butt, then, he decided.

Hit from behind, from the location of the wound. Lying toward the north, which meant they had been coming from the south.

"The hills," he said, his lips parting to permit the raw rasp of a voice. That was the way he had to go.

The soles of his feet were hot but not unbearably so. That was another indication that the hour was probably closer to sunrise than noon. The sands were not yet furnace hot. Not yet. It also meant he had to have been wearing footwear. He looked down. His leggings were worn out well above the ankles, the result of hard leather pressing on trousers pressing on underwear. Caused by boots. He checked the rest of his underwear. The fabric along the insides of his legs was slightly discolored-the pressure of trousers that had been straddling a horse.