Deathwatch by Robb White

Author:Robb White [White, Robb]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-79144-3
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2011-04-27T04:00:00+00:00

10

THERE WERE VOICES in the wind. Off and on all night Ben had listened to them: the whispering, the faint dry laughter, the chattering that sometimes sounded insane. As a little boy he had heard these wind voices and they had scared him, but his father had told him that the desert had to talk at night. That it was so silent during the day it just had to break out into all this talk at night.

Ben had never been afraid of the voices after that.

He had slept all night, guarded against Madec by birds that had come at sunset to roost at the mouth of the tunnel. Every time Ben moved in his sleep they fluttered and cried out, hustling away from him.

At dawn he had shot six birds, using only pebbles in the slingshot, saving the buckshot for a time when he might need the greater velocity and greater accuracy. He had plucked and cleaned them more efficiently than he had the others and now they were lying out on a smooth, clean rock, the sun already beginning to cook them.

Using water from the puddle, he had cleaned all the wounds he could reach and was pleased to see how fast they were healing. He had inspected his slingshot, examining the rubber tubes carefully to see that they were not beginning to break or wear at any place.

His beard was now six days old, for he made it a practice not to shave during long trips in the desert; a beard helped protect his face from the sun. When he looked at himself in the surface of the water his beard was very black and thick and gave him a strange, Satanic look; he looked dangerous.

Ben had a pleasant sense of well-being as he sat down in the tunnel out of reach of Madec’s gun and started practicing with the slingshot. His wounds only hurt when he moved carelessly, his arm only ached a little and, although he was hungry, he was content to wait until the carcasses became more appetizing.

He was getting so good with the slingshot that he could hit within an inch of where he aimed at thirty feet. At fifteen feet he was accurate even with a stone.

A nine-inch whiptail lizard came into view, and Ben threw a pebble at it to get it moving and then nailed it on the run at twenty feet.

He added it to his cooking birds and then stopped for a moment and looked through his peekhole at Madec.

The man had pitched camp at the foot of the butte, getting the Jeep in close to the breccia. He had parked facing the butte and had put up the tent behind the Jeep. The water cans were in under the awning of the tent, lined up in a neat row in the shade.

Madec was doing something around behind the Jeep. Ben could see his shadow moving.

As he sat down again and fitted the slingshot back into his hand he knew

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