something else.
“I see the fucker,” he announced. The head of a tall man had popped up into view perhaps a hundred yards away. Advancing to the next tree, he leaned against it, to steady the upcoming shot, and then dropped to his left knee.
He hadn’t
Something heavy had been slapping against his thigh with each stride. Something in his right pants pocket. When he dropped, his right knee came up, and that pocket got squeezed as the front of his trousers creased, and a large amount of warm fluid gushed out of it and washed over his right buttock and ran down his thigh.
He glanced down for the first time in a while and observed that he had also been shot on the right side of his abdomen and that blood had been running out of the wound this whole time and accumulating, for some reason, in his pocket.
He was lying on his back, and Yuxia was standing above him with her hands clapped over her mouth. She might have let out a bit of a scream.
He thrust the rifle up into the air with his good arm. “Shoot him,” he said. “Shoot Abdallah Jones.”
CSONGOR MOVED FORWARD cautiously to see whether he had managed to hit the man with the submachine gun. He heard a slight rustle and looked over to see Abdallah Jones, just standing there looking at him. Csongor moved his pistol around to bear on Jones. Jones brought a Kalashnikov around and aimed it at Csongor, at the same moment.
The range was greater than Csongor was comfortable with. His hands were shaking.
“You,” Jones said. “If it were anyone else, I’d have already pulled the trigger. As it is, I’m just standing here dumbfounded. How the hell, Csongor? It is Csongor, right?”
“Yes.”
“What the hell are you doing here?”
“The story is complicated.”
“Shame, that. Because I really would love to hear it. But there is, of course, no time.” He raised the Kalashnikov to his shoulder.
A crack sounded from off to the side. The sniper again. Jones looked in that direction, but showed no ill effects; the sniper had somehow missed.
Csongor dropped to the ground and began firing blindly through foliage.
Several rounds came back in his general direction, but this was nothing more than Jones firing to keep Csongor’s head down. It worked. The next time Csongor felt brave enough to lift his head, Jones was nowhere to be seen.
From over near the cabin, he heard the drone of a small engine starting up.
He stood to see Jones astride an all-terrain vehicle. Jones spent a few moments figuring out the controls, then got the thing turned around and headed around the side of the house, trying to make it out to the road.
SOKOLOV WAS IN worse pain than he’d ever experienced, and he reckoned that he might lose the leg before this was all over. Had even considered pulling out his knife and self-amputating. Other than that, however, he was not doing that badly. No bullets had struck him. He had not suffered serious trauma during the collapse of the sleeping porch. The actual deck of the porch, which had thudded into the ground right next to him—a blunt guillotine blade that would have pinched him in half, had he landed wrong—had formed a pocket; all the logs and other debris that had rained down on top had been held up above the ground by its planking, which had been crumpled and compressed but not altogether driven into the ground.
So he was fine. He just couldn’t move. The heap of logs provided several large apertures through which he could look out and view his surroundings, and he had experimented with aiming the rifle through these. But no targets had presented themselves.
Until, that is, he heard the ATV starting up.
He could not actually see the ATV—his view in that direction was blocked by a sizable chunk of the cabin’s roof—and so he assumed that this was Jake, come back to reclaim his vehicle.
It idled for a few moments. The driver revved its motor and put it into gear, then began to ride it around the side of the cabin, circumventing the debris pile in which Sokolov was trapped.
Through a gap between logs Sokolov caught a brief glimpse of the driver’s head. Jones.
He thrashed around, sending a shocking wave of pain up his leg, and twisted into a position from which he could fire the rifle through another gap. He expected that Jones would be passing by very soon.
Which Jones obligingly did, and Sokolov pulled the trigger a few times as the vehicle came into view.
The engine stopped with a mechanical crunch, and Jones cursed. Unfortunately the vehicle’s momentum had carried it out of Sokolov’s sight. He heard Jones climbing off and unlimbering his Kalashnikov. The end of the weapon’s barrel appeared for a moment, silhouetted on the edge of Sokolov’s aperture.
But the gunshots that he heard next were not Kalashnikov rounds fired from nearby, but pistol shots from a greater distance. Not just one, but two pistols firing round after round.
TOTALLY EXPOSED AT the base of the rubble pile, harassed by poorly aimed rounds from faraway pistols, unable to seek cover in the log heap because he knew that an armed man was lurking back in there, Jones rolled to his feet and broke into a run, heading away from the cabin, back the way he had come. When it became obvious what he was doing, Yuxia broke from cover and went charging after him, screaming curses and firing the pistol wildly until it was out of ammunition. But by that time, Jones had disappeared into the forest at the base of the hill.
A FEW MINUTES after Seamus and Yuxia left him behind, Richard forced himself to get on his feet and begin hobbling up the trail. He had swallowed as much ibuprofen as his system could handle and he had swaddled the sprained ankle in strips of fabric cut from Jahandar’s garments. A long tree branch, trimmed and whittled, served as a walking staff. The high road—the climb up to the top of the big flat rock, followed by the long traversal of the talus slope—would be many hours of misery for a man in his condition. But there was another way of getting to Jake’s, a low road leading along the edge of the forest, through the old abandoned mining camp and then around a spur of the mountain into the valley of Prohibition Crick. It seemed much the better choice. So he split off from the trail shortly before it pierced the tree line, and hobbled south through the woods. He had feared that this would turn into an endless, toiling death march, but once he found his stride, he began to make reasonably good time—not a hell of a lot slower than if he hadn’t sprained his ankle.
The first leg of the journey, from the trail to the old mining camp, presented some difficult going in places. At one point, he was forced to range up and down a slope looking for the easiest place to traverse it. In the end, he found the spot by noticing a trail that had been pounded into the ground by several people who had gone before him. It was obvious from the freshness of the traces and the litter left behind that he was now following literally in the bootprints of Jones’s contingent of jihadists. Once he worked his way through the difficult bit, which involved a certain amount of scooting along on his butt, keeping his staff planted to prevent him from avalanching down the hill, he came out into a stretch of more level ground that, if memory served, would lead eventually to the mining camp. Here the jihadists’ trail spread out, as they had formed a broad front while reconnoitering the level ground. Richard chugged along freely in their wake, planting his staff with each stride.
His mind wandered. He now dared to believe that everything was going to work out okay, that Zula would have made it safely to Jake’s by this point, and that he would get there soon. That Jones would slip away into the Idaho/Montana wilderness, or else be captured, and that life for the Forthrasts would return to normal. Which got him to thinking about all the email, all the tweets that would be waiting for him, all the things left undone. And as part of all that, it occurred to him to wonder what Egdod was up to. Because, come to think of it, Richard had been logged on as Egdod when Jones had severed his Internet link. Egdod would have reverted to his bothavior, which in his case would mean trudging for thousands of miles across T’Rain, trying to get back to his mountaintop palace. This would, to put it mildly, draw lots of notice in that world. He wondered how many high-level characters had showed up to attack Egdod, and whether any of them had succeeded in bringing the old man down. He tried to recollect what the landscapes looked like between Carthinias and Egdod’s home zone. He envisioned the aged
