Wake up.
He startled, his face jerking up from the soil.
He pushed stiffly to his elbows and looked all about him, frantic. It was still dark. The cold soil had him shivering.
He pushed the light on his watch. He couldn’t remember what time he’d entered the field. Five hours ago?
Dumb, dumb, dumb.
Had he heard something?
Get out.
Adrenaline coursing generously through him now, he pushed off the ground, abandoning thought, and ran. Stems bent and crashed away before him as he stomped through. The mountains rose to his left and to his right.
Moving target.
After not more than a few seconds his feet struck bare, open ground. He almost stumbled at the sudden lack of anything in his way.
He’d been a hundred feet from the end of the field.
He slowed, going to a squat like a runner on the starting blocks. He looked left and right and unholstered his pistol. At the sound of voices he took off running again, wildly.
Get there. Don’t stop.
The voices raised to shouts. He ran flat-out until he could hear them no more, and kept running as he hit the gentle slopes to the far pass.
He climbed as quickly as he could, not stopping until he’d crested the pass to the other side. He flung himself on the ground, heaving and panting. It had been easy going compared to the draw, but the thin air and his own adrenaline had him completely winded.
He checked his watch again. Light would come soon.
No one appeared to be following up the slopes. He took a long drink of water, draining the bladder, and collapsed on his back, allowing himself a minute to recover.
A fresh panorama greeted him on this side of the pass. He had crossed back into the Valley. It was narrower here, the opposing mountains closer and the bottom not so far below.
“Xanadu is what comes before the end of the world.”
He descended from the pass quickly, back down into the lingering fog. A full haze had enveloped him by the time he found the trail again. He took up his run and drove further on.
—
He guessed he’d gone barely another mile when he saw it. He might have missed the telltale markings had it not been for the early gathering light.
The goat track rose up and away from the trail to his right. He followed it, climbing through the dewy haze. As he’d expected, he didn’t have to climb far.
The track leveled onto a broad shelf of clear ground against the steeper mountainsides. Sheer rock walls, stained in dark brown, rose up from the site for a hundred feet or more before tapering into the rising slopes. He slowed to a walk and passed along its length. Its edge, where the ground sloped down into forest, was perhaps seventy-five feet from the cliffs at its widest. It couldn’t have been more than fifty yards long.
A slight breeze had picked up, beginning to move the fog, breaking it into clouds and wisps. The scene presented itself in pieces as he moved through the half-light.
Burned joists forked up through the shifting mist, reaching for the sky. A command post, maybe, or other temporary wooden construction.
The charred remains of a pair of shipping containers came into view next, their markings obliterated by the fire.
Other shapes were unidentifiable. Blackened debris littered the ground. He saw the scalded, skeletal chassis of a large diesel-powered generator.
You couldn’t help him.
At the end of the shelf he paused and turned back, surveying the scene.
“Sorry, Billy,” he murmured.
He turned and began climbing down the hillside toward the trail, leaving behind him the earthly remains of Combat Outpost Xanadu.
—
It was nearly fully light now. The Valley narrowed further as he moved deeper and higher. The hazy shapes of the peaks above were closer, the opposite slopes closing in. Trees crowded the trail and hindered the view ahead.
There were no more river sounds. He’d gotten above the springs and runoff that fed it.
The trail tightened ahead and bent around a hillside out of sight. He slowed to a walk and worked his way between trunks and rock at a narrow spot wide enough for a goat or a man and not much else.
Once clear of the bottleneck there was nothing else obscuring his view. The opposite slopes were barely a couple hundred feet away, and narrowing. The trees opened to scrubby mountain grass. Through the last remnants of mist he saw it ahead.
There was no more Valley left to climb. It was there before him, not a hundred yards away. The End of the World.
He approached in wonder, removing a glove, and touched it.
His heart sank.