No Sanctuary by Richard Laymon Read Free Book Online Page B

thought about the bottle. It was near the bottom of his pack.
    They had left their packs outside the tent, resting atop slabs of rock on the other side of the campsite and covered with ponchos.
    Not only was his bourbon out there, but so was his revolver. A lot of good the gun would do them some forty feet from the tent, but Rick didn’t want Bert to know about that, either. The gun was a double-whammy; she hated firearms in general, and Rick bringing one on the camping trip would probably be seen as an act of cowardice.
    If I’d had a gun the last time ...
    Maybe I should’ve told Bert the whole truth this morning. Giving her that sanitized version probably just made me look yellow—like I was a kid back when it happened, scared of my own shadow.
    Rick had never told the whole truth about that camping trip to anyone.
     
    When they first came upon the lake, Rick had wanted to keep moving. It was a deep shade of blue, itself beautiful, but trapped in a landscape of such desolation that Rick felt the skin crawl on the back of his neck in spite of the heavy sun.
    Steep canyon walls loomed over the lake on three sides. High up were gray stretches of glacier shaded by overhangs so that they probably never melted completely, year after year. There were a few scraggly patches of foliage on the rock walls, trees stunted and twisted into grotesque shapes. Otherwise, the slopes were bleached tumbles of broken granite.
    The trail down from Windover Pass led to a small oasis that looked alien in the midst of the otherwise bleak surroundings. The oasis, a shady clearing near the lake shore, had a campsite.
    A nice campsite, probably added onto over the years by many people who had stopped there after the exhausting trek down from the pass. There was a stone fireplace with a heavy steel grill that must’ve been brought in by mule. Surrounding the fireplace were several flat-topped rocks that could be used as either seats or tables. Here and there were walls of stone, no doubt constructed to hold back the winds that must rip through the canyon at night. The site even had a few flat areas, mostly near walls, that looked as if they had been carefully cleared of rocks and leveled.
    Dad swung his backpack to the ground and stretched. The armpits of his tan shirt were dark with sweat. “Fantastic, huh?” he asked.
    “I don’t like it,” Rick said.
    “What’s not to like?” Dad asked.
    “This place gives me the creeps.”
    “It is a little ... barren,” Mom admitted. “They built those walls. The wind must be awful.”
    “Well, folks, it might be a long trek to the next decent spot. Even if we move on, there’s no guarantee we’ll find any place better than this. Might even be worse.”
    “It’s still pretty early in the day,” Mom said.
    Dad showed her the topographies map, pointing out what lay ahead. Mom grimaced. “I guess we stay,” she said.
    They set up camp, pitching the larger tent in the flat area between two of the stone walls, setting up Rick’s tent in a naturally sheltered area beside a high clump of rock. After arranging their gear, they rested for a while. Dad sat on a rock near the shore and smoked a corncob pipe. Mom sat cross-legged under a tree and read, and Rick lay down inside his tent. The tent was hot in spite of the shade, but he liked being enclosed, hidden away from the bleak landscape.
    Later, Dad suggested that they take a hike to “explore the environs.”
    Rick wanted no part of the environs. “Let’s not and say we did,” he suggested.
    “Stay if you want,” Dad told him. “We probably won’t be gone more than an hour.”
    “Mom, are you going, too?”
    She crawled out of the bigger tent, stood up and nodded. She had changed into a tube top that wrapped her breasts and left her midriff bare, and cut-off jeans so short that the ends of the front pockets hung out below the frayed leg holes. She had abandoned her hiking boots for a pair of ragged tennis shoes. “You want to come,”