"Tom, listen to me."
Tom hunkered down by Stu's big, fluffy sleeping bag. It was the next morning. Stu had been able to eat only a little breakfast; his throat was sore and badly swollen, all his joints painful. The cough was worse, and the Anacin wasn't doing much of a job of knocking back the fever.
"I got to get inside and get some medicine into me or I'm gonna die. And it has to be today. Now, the closest town is Green River, and that's sixty miles east of here. We'll have to drive."
"Tom Cullen can't drive a car, Stu. Laws, no!"
"Yeah, I know. It's gonna be a chore for me, because as well as being sick as a dog, I broke the wrong friggin leg."
"What do you mean?"
"Well... never mind right now. It's too hard to explain. We won't even worry about it, because that ain't the first problem. The first problem is getting a car to start. Most of them have been sitting out here three months or more. The batteries will be as flat as pancakes. So we'll need a little luck. We got to find a stalled car with a standard shift at the top of one of these hills. We might do it. It's pretty hilly country." He didn't add that the car would have to have been kept reasonably tuned, would have to have some gas in it... and an ignition key. All those guys on TV might know how to hotwire a car, but Stu didn't have a clue.
He looked up at the sky, which was scumming over with clouds. "Most of it's on you, Tom. You got to be my legs."
"All right, Stu. When we get the car, are we going back to Boulder? Tom wants to go to Boulder, don't you?"
"More than anything, Tom." He looked toward the Rockies, which were a dim shadow on the horizon. Had the snow started falling up in the high passes yet? Almost certainly. And if not yet, then soon. Winter came early in this high and forsaken part of the world. "It may take a while," he said.
"How do we start?"
"By making a travois."
"Trav - ?"
Stu gave Tom his pocket knife. "You've got to make holes in the bottom of this sleeping bag. One on each side."
It took them an hour to make the travois. Tom found a couple of fairly straight sticks to ram down into the sleeping bag and out the holes at the bottom. Tom got some rope from the U-Haul where he had gotten the broiling pan, and Stu used it to secure the sleeping bag to the poles. When it was done, it reminded Stu more of a crazy rickshaw than a travois like the ones the Plains Indians had used.
Tom picked up the poles and looked doubtfully over his shoulder. "Are you in, Stu?"
"Yeah." He wondered how long the seams would hold before unraveling straight up the sides of the bag. "How heavy am I, Tommy?"
"Not bad. I can haul you a long way. Giddup!"
They started moving. The gully where Stu had broken his leg - where he had been sure he was going to die - fell slowly behind them. Weak though he was, Stu felt a mad sort of exultation. Not there, anyway. He was going to die somewhere, and probably soon, but it wasn't going to be alone in that muddy ditch. The sleeping bag swayed back and forth, lulling him. He dozed. Tom pulled him along under a thickening scud of clouds. Kojak padded along beside them.
Stu woke up when Tom eased him down.
"Sorry," Tom said apologetically. "I had to rest my arms." He first twirled, then flexed them.
"You rest all you want," Stu said. "Slow and easy wins the race." His head was thudding. He found the Anacin and dry-swallowed two of them. It felt as if his throat had been lined with sandpaper and some sadistic soul was striking matches on it. He checked the sleeping bag seams. As he had expected, they were coming unraveled, but it wasn't too bad yet. They were on a long, gradual upslope, exactly the sort of thing he had been looking for. On a slope like this, better than two miles long, a car with the clutch disengaged could get cruising along pretty good. You could try to pop-start it in second, maybe even third gear.
He looked longingly to the left, where a plum-colored Triumph was parked askew in the breakdown lane. Something skeletal in a bright woolen sweater leaned behind the wheel. The Triumph would have a manual transmission, but there was no way in God's world that he could get his splinted leg into that small cabin.
"How far have we come?" he asked Tom, but Tom could only shrug. It had been quite a piece, anyway, Stu thought. Tom had pulled him for at least three hours before stopping to rest. It spoke of phenomenal strength. The old landmarks were gone in the distance. Tom, who was built like a young bull, had dragged him maybe six or eight miles while he dozed. "You rest all you want," he repeated. "Don't knock yourself out."