Harlan's Race

laboring, legs bending, lungs hurting, scrambling up the slope. Vince’s and my racing flats were sliding on dry leaves. This was the worst I’d ever felt. It seemed as if I’d been running like a lunatic all my life — chasing images of terror and repression. Now America even had us chasing a monstrous image of a new disease. The race would never end. It was all of history. It was millenniums of human time. The cross-country race from Hell.
    Pulling on a last shredded glimpse of my Muse inside me, I surged ahead. Chino was out of sight somewhere, plunging through the brush like a stag. Clear sky showed ahead — the ravine. I’d have to be careful not to run off the edge. Then I was out of the brush, on the edge. From behind a tree, the cyclist stepped out, holding that strange little gun on me.
    He was about 20 feet away. I could see the gun clearly now — the bore-hole in the barrel, and a rubber bicycle handle screwed into it for him to hold it by. That .22 high-velocity round, meant for Vince or Michael, now was aimed at me. His finger was on the simple little trigger, no trigger guard, that unlocked out of the barrel.
    Sweaty, panting, we faced each other, right on the brink of the dizzy drop. Up closer, I could see that his dark hair was a good dye job. Something in his build was familiar — and that lean, well-made sexy hand, fingers bared by the bicycle glove, now holding the gun. Where had I seen that hand?
    There I was, with nothing but a stick in my own hand. Instinctively, I raised my arms in surrender.
    His face was frozen with a cold, intelligent, yet freaky rage — teeth showing, nostrils white.
    “Satan’s beauty!” he rasped in a deep strange voice. ‘You pushed me — now you suffer my judgment!”
    Even with the rage in it, the voice was somehow familiar.
    “Chris?” I gasped.
    “I’m taking you with me this time!” he shouted.
    He tore off his goggles and mustache with his left hand. Even with the brown contact lenses and nostril inserts that made his nose look wider, I could see that it was him. Behind Chris, our cormorant had emerged from the brush and saw the situation at a glance. He’d put his .38 down. I knew he could hardly use it without endangering me.
    “Chris, are you crazy?” I shouted back. “Cool out!”
    “Put the gun down, amigo, and we’ll talk this out!” Chino called in a calming tone. “I’m not armed.”
    But we were talking to a lunatic. He laughed — that boyish laugh gone bad.
    “Come on, Harlan, you and I are going to fuck in Hell!”
    His finger tightened on the trigger.
    Almost before I could register the thought of death, there was the high crack of the .22 and the blow on my left breast. It felt like someone hitting me hard with a hammer. As I staggered a little, Chino rushed Chris, knowing he’d fired his one and only round.
    As our quarry whirled to face the new assailant, holding the gun like he intended to club Chino with it, Chris’ sudden movement loosed the unstable ground at the edge. I threw the stick at him hard, like a knife, hitting his upper arm, making him drop the gun. Vince was there too, racing up, hurling the rock, hitting him in the shoulder with deadly force, getting him off balance.
    Suddenly, a whole section of the edge — loose, light soil and gravel — gave way under him. Strangely silent, as if he accepted his fate, he plunged down the cliff in a plume of dust, hit a rock, bounced horribly and fell again.
    As the clatter of echoes died away along the ravine and the dust cleared, we saw Chris laying motionless in the rocky wash, 50 feet below.
    Chino sprang to me, and ripped up my shirt. Right over my heart, a fierce little hematoma was welling up rapidly. The body armor had stopped the bullet. Vince found it in the dust at my feet — flattened due to the muzzle velocity of almost 2000 feet per second.
    “Don’t touch it,” Chino said. “It’s evidence.”
    My passionate sidekick stared into my eyes.
    “If I hadn’t made you wear the fucking Kevlar, man,” he snapped, “you’d be dead.”
    Grabbing his little walkie, one of the very ones that we’d bought years ago for the beach house, he called the police and paramedics.
    Meanwhile, Vince was bending over. He’d run so hard that now he was puking up the juice he’d drunk, like a sick dog. I was shaking all over, feeling the stings where branches had ripped my skin.
    Then Chino picked up his .38 and found an old path he knew, down the drop.