The Walls of Air Page 0,66
him, or even having Ingold run him through with his own sword suddenly seemed a whole lot more comfortable and dignified than being dirtily mauled to pieces by a gang of Neanderthals. He was scanning the skyline and finally found what he was looking for - a distant clump of trees marking a water hole. He wondered how well dooic climbed. But in the trees he could at least get his back to something and fend them off. As it was, with his being surrounded in open ground, it looked like a losing proposition.
As he moved, he was conscious of the whole ring of them on both sides of him as well as behind. He could hear them shifting up through the brush to get ahead of him. If he let that happen, he figured it would be kiss-off time. He quickened his pace toward the trees - cottonwoods, he saw now - some two miles off. Without breaking stride, he unbuckled his sword belt and shifted the weapon up over his back, getting ready to run for it. On second thought, he also pulled off his cloak, rolling it up and bundling it under the sword belt. All he needed, he thought wryly, was to trip over the damn thing. He tried to judge the distance to the trees but couldn't; the dry, clear air of the desert made things look closer than they really were. He knew that, once he broke into a run, he had damn well better stay ahead of the pack.
He glimpsed movement in the sagebrush ahead of him and to the sides humped, skittering shapes making a dash across open ground. Here goes nothing, Rudy thought. He broke into a run.
On all sides of him, the ground seemed to erupt dooic. He hadn't thought there were so many of them - twenty-five at least, rushing toward him with shrill, grunting howls, some of them from much closer than he'd suspected. Those ahead of him tried to close in, but it was no race. Rudy's longer legs carried him past them, and he sprinted out ahead, running for the trees with the pack streaming at his heels.
Once, when he was a very young child, Rudy had been chased for blocks by the local dog pack; he still remembered the heart-bursting terror of that run. But that had only been for a few hundred yards. He saw almost at once that he'd have to pace himself. The dooic were well behind him, but their whistling grunts still carried to his' ears, and he knew they would overtake him when he'd run himself breathless. He tried to judge their speed and slow his own to match it. Already the trees looked farther off" than they had looked before, and he knew it was going to be a long run. He thought fleetingly, Why couldn't I have been a jogger instead of a goddam biker? His chest was aching now; his body, toughened though it had been by the endless miles of walking, burned with fatigue. And to think there were people who ran twenty-six miles for the hell of it.
He felt himself flagging before half the distance was run. The raucous yammering behind him grew louder; and risking a glance backward, he saw the leaders of the pack a dozen yards from him, running with a rolling, bandylegged lope. The flash of bared yellow tusks sent a surge of adrenalin through him that carried him a few yards farther from them, but he was already stumbling, the strain telling in every muscle of his sweat-soaked body.
He hit the trees three strides in front of the pack, barely able to breathe or stand, and swept his sword from its scabbard in an over-the-shoulder slash that hacked the arm half off the nearest of his pursuers. The blade jammed between ribs and sternum, and the creature went down howling in a geyser of blood, while the rest of the ring broke and drew back. In sickened panic, Rudy put his foot on the still-writhing Neanderthal to pull the sword free, and the thing's teeth slashed the leather of his boot and the flesh beneath before it expired as the blade came clear. Rudy fell back against the tree as the circle closed on him, hacking desperately at hairy hands and faces, sobbing with exhaustion, and being splattered with blood and dust. A thrown rock caught him on the shoulder as the dooic drew back again out of sword range.