Clearing the rubble around the end of the stick, Mildred heaved a sigh of relief when she found that Doc’s fist was wrapped stubbornly around the silver lion’s-head. More rubble found his arm uncovered, while Jak had managed to unearth his head and shoulders. It took some time to clear all of the debris from around and over him, but eventually Doc was completely clear.
Mildred examined him as thoroughly as she could. He was breathing shallowly but regularly, and there seemed to be no bones broken. But he was unconscious. Opting to move him clear of the area, Ryan and Jak took him between them and carried him clear of the area. The movement stirred him and he began to speak…almost inaudibly, with no real coherence.
“…when shall we three meet…parting is such sweet—such sweet what, do I wonder? My dear, you look so sweet tonight…. I thought I would never see you again, sweet Lori…. Or is it Emily? Did either of you really exist, I wonder, or were you little more than the fevered imagining of those sweet, immortal moments before death finally claims its own? Can it be immortal if measured against death, I wonder? Ah, what a dilemma for any philosopher…a problem so simple a five-year-old could solve it. Someone, pray go and get me a five-year-old child before it drives me mad.”
Ryan was glad when they were able to put Doc down on the flat earth and he was able to return, with Jak, to the rubble and his search for J.B. Mildred and Krysty remained with Doc, trying to nurse him back to full consciousness.
“Ryan, think Doc okay?” Jak asked as they returned to their search.
Ryan shrugged. “Mebbe.”
Jak looked at Ryan’s grim visage, the fire in his ice-blue eye, and he knew that Ryan wouldn’t rest until the Armorer was found: Jak agreed with that, but was also worried about how long they could keep going out in this heat, with little in the way of water and supplies.
Jak looked up to the sky, squinting at the sun. “Past noon—soon be too hot work. Dust bowl keeps heat. No good to J.B. if wipe us out.”
Ryan drew a deep breath. “Yeah, you’re right. We’ll take the next two hundred yards, roughly, of debris, then rest up for a while. We’ll also need to work out what water and food we’ve got, see how long we can do this, though if we’re lucky we won’t have to hang around too long.”
“Yeah, mebbe,” Jak mused, noting that there was a note of doubt in the big man’s voice. Like Jak, Ryan was wondering if they would be able to find J.B. And like Jak, he was loathe to voice this doubt.
So they kept digging….
By the end of the day, as the darkness fell, there had still been no signs of the missing Armorer. There was still a vast area of uncovered debris to be raked, but they were sore and weary, muscles and bones protesting at the strain. Doc had been resting, his breathing still shallow and difficult from his problems prior to the cave-in, but the others had all bent their backs to the task. Using whatever scrub they could find, they built a fire and sat silently around it, eating from self-heats without once complaining about the taste. There was a gloomy, depressed aura around them.
“Think find him?” Jak said after a long silence, voicing the thought that the others had dared not.
Ryan looked across at the young man, the fire catching a reflection in his good eye, seeming to emphasize his mood. “We’ve got to. Can’t stop trying,” was all he said.
They mounted a watch through the night, taking it in turns to guard while the others caught some much-needed rest. Sleep came easily, as their bodies tried to recover from the rigors of the day. It was hard to rouse each other at the turn of the watch. But the violence of the earth movement had scared away any predators and there were no signs of the mutie dog pack that had caused them so many problems. Even the snufflings and shufflings of the small mammals that tried to eke a living out of this inhospitable terrain were few and far between.
Morning came, but the rising of the sun offered no release from their mood. Acknowledging how exhausted they all were, and that going full-tilt would benefit no one, Ryan organized a rota where they would divide up the remaining area. They would search in pairs, one on while the other rested. He excluded Doc, much to the old man’s initial annoyance. Although Doc’s breathing had improved, a turn in the sun would likely cause the old man severe problems as searching through of the rubble only stirred up more dust and dirt in the air.
And so the search continued. Grim, bitter, monotonous and depressing. The sun rose higher in the sky, burned down on their backs as they searched. There was no real shade, only that which they could construct with their coats and a few sticks taken from the surrounding scrub. The air was stifling. They were dehydrated, barely keeping their water levels up, striving to conserve the water they had left. On his off-time, Jak tried to search for any water holes that may be around for the wildlife. There had to be some sources of water for them to live in this harsh environment. But he drew a blank. Whatever source they had for their water was deep in the burrows, down where the water table existed, coming nowhere near the surface.
By the fall of the day, they were all beginning to give up hope. There was only a small area of the debris that hadn’t been combed; they had little in the way of supplies; and another day or two under the harsh Arkansas sun would fry them.
“We can’t stop,” Ryan said simply. “He’s got to be here somewhere. We were all pitched out here, so he must have been, too. We just haven’t found him.”
“But what are the chances of finding him alive now?” Mildred asked. “God alone knows I don’t want to think about this, Ryan, you know that. But it’s been two days. If he’s been buried and unconscious that long, under this sun….” She shrugged.
“We can’t give up now,” Ryan muttered tersely.
“I’m not saying we do. Just that we need to face the fact that we might not find him. And if we carry on looking too long, we’ll buy the farm ourselves,” Mildred countered.
Ryan’s face was grim. “You think I don’t know that? One more day, going through the last of the rocks. If he’s chilled, then we give him a decent burial, right?”
None could argue with that statement.
With the rising sun the next morning, they began again. Working once more in shifts, they searched the last area of debris. It was empty.
“Fireblast! What the fuck happened to him?” Ryan seethed with impotent rage. “He can’t have just vanished. Mebbe…mebbe he was thrown beyond us.”
“How could that have happened?” Krysty queried. “For Gaia’s sake, Ryan, look around you. Where else could he have been? There is nowhere else.”
Ryan slowly turned 360 degrees. Beyond the circumference of the debris there was nothing except flat dust bowl earth. Nowhere that the Armorer could be hidden, chilled or alive. The flat, dusty landscape seemed to mock him with its bland openness, hiding nothing and revealing nothing about where J.B. had gone.
“We’re here. All of us,” Ryan reiterated. “We got thrown out. J.B. must have been, too. He can’t have been left in there.”
“Ryan,” Krysty said softly, “it was a maze down there. It’s incredible that we all ended up in the same place. We could have been swept down any number of tunnels that didn’t immediately cave in. J.B. might still be down there.”
“I can’t leave it at that,” Ryan said with an irritated shake of his
