End Time by Keith Korman Page B

forty-three, the retired Major Howahkan still had a whole life to live.
    Which is when Tonto found the paleface.
    Billy tripped over Clem Lattimore, a lost tenderfoot in the Sonoran Desert with a fractured ankle, a dead cell phone, and a blistered hour away from final dehydration. Billy saw the man lying up against a pretty red boulder, his pants ripped, shirt open, sunburnt to a crisp. Little boy lost, separated from his group along with their sunblock, fruit juice, and evening margaritas. Clearly the easy field trip to the Saguaro National Park had gone the way of Deliverance . A Gila monster kept Clem quiet company from a nice warm spot on the rock. Perfectly happy to watch the white man die and do nothing about it.
    What had drawn Billy Shadow to the spot was the bird. He’d seen the vulture high in the sky, and there was always something interesting to see under the shade of the vulture’s wings. The vast spirit of land and sky ran strong in him; memories of birds singing their morning songs and smart foxes smiling in the tall grass—the “old ways” rattled in his gourd long after Billy put on long pants. The ancient ground, forever in your bones; just the way you looked at things.
    A vulture in the sky. A lizard on a rock.
    Everything meant something; everything significant, if you could read the signs. Clem Lattimore cracked his blistered eyelids, hearing Billy Shadow’s footsteps, and heard for the first time the mysterious voice of salvation.
    â€œYou know, Chief,” the voice from the silhouette told him, “you really look like you need a drink.” And before Lattimore knew it, the water bottle splashed his face and came to his mouth. The man wanted to say thank you, to cry—but he was simply too dry for tears. All that came out was, “Dahh…”
    â€œEasy now, Kemo Sabe.” The voice told him. “We’re going to find your friends.”
    So an accident of fate and the Tonto wisecrack started Billy’s second life, getting him a job with one of the richest men in America. And the two were a natural fit: Clem needed an XO, and a US Cavalry major, retired, three months home, who’d saved his life in the desert, couldn’t be beat. Besides, Major Billy Shadow, retired or not, knew things besides walking out of the desert alive. And the old Lone Ranger shtick went on from there. Something personal between them. And not for outsiders, who hadn’t nearly died or been saved.
    *   *   *
    Beyond the elevator, Lattimore’s private floor engulfed you. Billy called it “the Library”; not just hearth, home, and bed, but something much more—a collection of books and artifacts spanning disciplines and centuries. He’d once joked to Clem, “So you got the Spear of Christ in here somewhere?” But still the Library made a kind of sense; so much of the mind of mankind represented on its shelves and from its spines: literature, poetry, the sciences, history. You could find Alexander Marshack’s The Roots of Civilization next to Cremo and Thompson’s Forbidden Archeology, and even Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods.
    Billy had spent countless hours after work and even weekends up here reading, trying to separate truth from fantasy, at last exasperated, demanding of Lattimore, “Aren’t Däniken with his god’s hot rods and Marshack with his knuckle-scraping, hairy moon-counters, cutting notches in pieces of bone, in some way mutually exclusive? We either received our religion, technology, and science, even our DNA, in fallen comet ice from the stars”—he took a breath—“or we dragged ourselves from the slime right here at home, alone. It’s either one or the other, don’t you think?”
    As usual Lattimore sat at his desk, back turned, his swivel chair facing out the bronze-colored window. A wreath of cigar smoke floated above his head, still and nearly frozen.