borders?
The air in the bag was gone, and he could feel his own hot sweat pooling in the small of his back; his clothes were stuck on him like a wetsuit. The noise around him had subsided, and he thought it might be safe to pull the zipper down an inch or two and test the air. The second he did, a film of black ash fell onto his face, and he sputtered to get it off his lips and out of his mouth. But there wasn’t any fire to be seen, at least not through that tiny opening, and he had started to pull the zipper down a little more — damn, it was sticking — when he heard what sounded like footsteps, approaching from the street. Tate, he thought — he’d survived it somehow after all. And while his first impulse was to cry out for some help — come on, the danger was over now, couldn’t they just act like buddies once again? — he wasn’t sure that Tate wouldn’t harbor some grudge. He might take advantage of Sadowski’s defenseless position — wrapped in a bag with a stuck zipper — to beat the shit out of him.
The footsteps had stopped, and Sadowski wondered what Tate was thinking. Was he wondering why Sadowski hadn’t outfitted him with an asbestos sheath, too? Had he been burned — badly — by the fire? Was he going to be really hard to look at?
And what should he, Sadowski, do? Should he play dead? Or should he say something, or stir inside the bag, to show that he was still alive in there? His fingers instinctively reached for the gun that he now regretted having left in the car.
The footsteps came closer, but they sounded heavy and hard. Maybe Tate was on his last legs. That wouldn’t actually be so bad; if he died, Sadowski could take his wallet and ID off of him, and his body would probably never be identified; there’d be a lot of unidentified remains by tomorrow, Sadowski figured.
Either way, Sadowski hoped he had a full canteen on him; his throat was parched and he’d left his own water supply in the Explorer.
Sadowski didn’t hear anything more, but he sensed someone very close by, and even through the small aperture he could smell something now — but it wasn’t like human sweat or flesh, even of the slightly cooked kind. He knew those smells pretty damn well, from the white phosphorus attacks they’d laid down on the insurgents in Iraq. No, this was a different smell, but it, too, took him back to the desert… to the day that Captain Greer had talked them all into that little extracurricular mission outside Mosul. It was the smell he’d encountered in that empty zoo in al-Kalli’s palace… where the bars of the cages were bent like they’d been hit with battering rams… and Lopez, the poor dead son of a bitch, had helped to press on the wings of that iron peacock… to reveal the box that Greer claimed he had never opened.
He decided not to call out. Or move. Or give any sign of life at all.
But the footsteps came closer anyway. And something was strange about that, too. It didn’t sound like two footsteps at a time… but four.
Sadowski tried to pull the zipper closed again, but it was stuck firmly in place.
And the smell — of scorched fur and rugged hide — got much stronger.
Sadowski froze, not so much as breathing anymore.
But something was breathing — and it was directly above him now. As he peered through the hole in the bag, he saw a green eye, as big as a baseball, looking back down at him. He felt a trickle of urine stream down his leg.
The creature snorted — its breath was as fetid as a garbage dump — and Sadowski felt a broad paw grazing the top of the bag… looking for a way in.
The gentle pawing became more firm, and Sadowski could swear that he heard the click of the creature’s claws suddenly extending; one of them, an evil, crooked talon, hooked itself inside the tiny opening at the top of the bag and drew the zipper down as smoothly as a tailor. Sadowski lay there like a sardine in an opened can, while above him he saw what looked like a giant hyena, a mottled beast with hanging fangs and a thick matting of black fur all across its shoulders and neck.
Sadowski wanted to jump up and run, but his feet were still tangled in the bottom of the sheath, and when he tried to kick them free, the creature reared up on its hind legs, the black fur flying out like a cape, like the wings you’d see on a vampire bat. And then — just as Sadowski had mustered enough spit to scream — the beast threw back its head and let out a howl of its own, more bone-chilling than anything Sadowski had ever heard, and loud enough to drown out his own cry altogether.
Then it fell forward — jaws open and claws out — its black fur wrapping itself like a reeking veil around his thrashing head.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Sunset Boulevard was predictably snarled, the traffic inching along as policemen, stationed at the major intersections, tried to redirect the cars and keep the lanes moving at all. Carter ached to hit the klaxon again, and then use the limo like a snowplow, just shoving everything ahead of him out of the way; he had no doubt that this car could do it. Everytime he stopped dead, he studied the screens and dials on the dashboard, and eventually he found the phone connection.
“Number, please,” an automated female voice said.
Carter, relieved, recited his home phone number.
But instead of connecting him, the voice said, “Unrecognized caller. Please say your name.”
What would it recognize? Al-Kalli? Or, more likely, Jakob? And did he need Jakob’s last name? — because he had no idea what that was.
Carter tried “Jakob.”
The automated voice did not respond.
He tried “Mohammed al-Kalli.”
But again, there was no reply.
“Please say your name,” the voice finally repeated.
And this time, in total frustration, Carter simply said his own.
“Unrecognized caller. Please say your name.”
Carter gave up. Maybe they had some code name; maybe it could actually recognize Jakob’s voice itself. The blue light, next to the siren, was still silently flashing. What the hell was that, anyway — LoJack?
“Good-bye,” the automated voice chirped.
“Yeah, right,” Carter replied, “have a nice day.”
A cop waved him through a blocked intersection — he managed to go about three car lengths — before he had to stop again entirely. He lowered his head to peer up through the tinted windshield at the sky; the wispy cirrus clouds that he had seen earlier were eclipsed now by plumes of smoke, rising like funnels from every direction. It reminded him of the pictures he’d seen from Kuwait, when the fleeing Iraqis had set the oil wells on fire.
What the hell was going on? Was the whole city of Los Angeles going up in flames? He was reminded of the guys in army fatigues — Sadowski and his pals — who had shown up at the bestiary, and of something their leader had said: “Oh, I’ve got a plan,” or something like that, and then he’d glanced at his watch, as if making sure he was still on schedule. It seemed both impossible and incomprehensible — why would anyone do it? — but Carter had to wonder if what he was seeing was more than random wildfires, started by careless picnickers or kids with fireworks. Was it some insane and orchestrated plan?
He crawled forward, another thirty or forty feet, just as a helicopter swooped overhead; more images of Middle Eastern warfare teemed in his head. And his fear for the safety of Beth and Joey suddenly grew, exponentially. Were they home? Were they waiting there for him? Or had they fled to safety somewhere else?
A fire truck, sirens blaring, maneuvered itself across the intersection, right in front of Carter, and then, with a police escort clearing the way in front of it, started driving along the shoulder toward Sepulveda. The right side of the fire truck was riding up on the sidewalks and curbs, but Carter saw his chance and he took it; he gunned the Mercedes and caught the fire truck’s wake, following along close behind. A firefighter, manning the ladder at the rear, waved him off, shouting, but Carter couldn’t make out what he was saying — though he could certainly guess the gist of it — and he didn’t care, anyway. He was determined to get to Summit View, and this was the only way to
