He pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.
“Shit!”
A jam. He frantically worked the bolt. The bird took one hop toward him and cocked an eye at him. Then it pecked at him, and grabbed the gun. It was a shiny object; it had attracted the bird’s eye. The mynah slammed the gun against a rock, crumpling it, and tossed it aside. Then it held up its head, opened its beak, and howled, letting out a cry that seemed to make the ground shake.
Rick, meanwhile, had thrown himself flat, and was crawling for the harpoon, which lay near the pool.
The mynah turned its attention to Erika, who cowered in the moss. She crouched, staring up at the bird, and suddenly lost her nerve. She broke and ran, ducking her head, whimpering.
“Don’t, Erika!” Rick shouted at her.
Erika’s motion drew the bird’s attention, and it hopped toward her.
Karen King had been watching, and she made a sudden decision. She would sacrifice her life for Erika. She would give Erika a chance to live. It was good while it lasted, she thought, and stood up and ran toward the bird, waving her arms. “Hey! Take me!”
The bird swerved, and pecked at Karen, but missed her, and she went sprawling. Erika had now jumped into the truck and was attempting to start it. Erika had gone into a full-blown panic; she didn’t know what she was doing, other than trying to get away. Danny shouted at her, “Stop! I order you to stop!” Erika paid no attention. The truck lurched off, and began climbing upward along the rocks. But it was very exposed.
She was deserting the others.
“Erika! Turn around!” Karen screamed.
Erika had gone past the point of hearing anybody.
The truck, shiny and moving up the cliff, its six legs working, must have seemed like something tasty or interesting. A mynah coasted in and plucked Erika out of the driver’s seat. Packs and gear flew out of the truck as it tumbled down the cliff and bounced out into sheer air. And then it was gone.
The mynah landed, carrying Erika Moll in its beak. The bird slammed her several times against the cliff, whipping its head back and forth to kill its prey. The bird then took off, carrying the corpse. Immediately it got into a squabble with another mynah, and they fought with each other over the remains of Erika Moll, and tore the body apart in midair.
It wasn’t over. Rick had gotten his hands on the harpoon, and he looked around: where was Karen? She was lying on the ground, out in the open, underneath a mynah. The bird, which had an unusual black streak on its bill, had landed, and was staring down at Karen. It seemed to be trying to make up its mind about her. Was this thing edible?
“Karen!” Rick shouted, and threw the harpoon at the bird.
The harpoon, a thread of metal, went into the bird’s feathers. Not very far. The bird shook itself, and the harpoon dropped to the ground. The bird studied Karen.
She crouched, trying to make herself look small and unappetizing.
“Over here!” Rick shouted, and started running, hoping to distract the bird.
“No, Rick!”
The mynah cocked its eye at Karen when she spoke. It lunged for her and picked her up in its beak, threw its head back, and swallowed Karen in one gulp. Then it flew off, wings thundering.
“Damn you!” Rick yelled at the mynah. He waved the harpoon at the bird, which had become a fluttering speck in the distance. “Come back with her!” The flock in the trees chattered and roared. Now he couldn’t tell which of them had eaten Karen. “Come back! Come back for a fair fight!” He jumped up and down, waving his arms, shaking the harpoon.
He felt like crying. He would have done anything to get the mynah bird to come back, the one with the streak on its bill. He couldn’t give up now.
But then he remembered something he’d learned about birds. A bird does not have a stomach. It has a crop.
Chapter 33
Edge of Tantalus 31 October, 10:15 a.m.
Karen King was curled up in a fetal position inside the crop of the mynah bird, holding her breath. The muscular walls of the crop pressed in on her, clamping her in place so that she couldn’t move. The walls were slimy, slick, and smelled foul. However, there were no digestive juices in the crop. It was simply a bag for storing food, before the food was passed down into the rest of the digestive system.
She knew the bird was flying, because she felt the regular thump-thump of the bird’s pectoralis muscles, driving its wings. She got her arms around her face and pushed outward, and managed to open a space for her nose and mouth.
She took a breath.
The air smelled horrible, with an acid stench of rotting insects, but at least it was air. Not much air, though. Almost immediately it became stifling hot and she began to pant. A wave of claustrophobia came over her. She wanted to scream. With an act of will she tried to calm herself. If she began to scream and struggle, she would use up the air quickly and would suffocate. The only way to stay alive was to stay calm, move sparingly, and try to make the air last as long as possible. She straightened her spine and pushed her legs out. This stretched the crop and opened up a little more space. Even so, she was running out of air.
She tried to get her knife in her hand, but she’d tucked it down deep in her hip pocket. She couldn’t reach the knife. The muscular walls of the bird’s crop held her arm back.
Damn. Gotta get that knife.
Right then she vowed to hang her knife around her neck, in the future. If there was a future…she drove her right arm downward, fighting against the rubbery walls that surrounded her. She forced her fingertips into the pocket, and let her breath out with a whoosh, gulped in nasty air, and coughed. Her fingertips closed on a bottle in her pocket-what was this? It was the spray bottle. Filled with beetle spray. Rick had filled it.
A weapon.
She grimaced, and dragged the bottle out.
At that moment, the bird maneuvered in flight. The crop tightened, the muscles squeezing the breath out of her lungs with a whoosh. A sensation of weightlessness came over her, a sense of falling. Then came a lurch and a bump. The bird had landed. She lost consciousness.
The mynah had returned to the same spot where it had caught Karen, looking for more food. It stared at Rick Hutter, cocking its head.
Rick recognized the black streak on its bill. The same bird. It had eaten Karen; no way of knowing if she was still alive. But she might be. He waved the harpoon in front of him and advanced toward the bird. “Come and get me, you cowardly bastard.”
The Masai thrust. That was what he had to do to this bird. A young Masai warrior, a boy of thirteen or fourteen, can kill a lion with a spear. It’s doable, he told himself. It’s all about technique.
The bird hopped toward him.
He watched, judging the distance, timing his move, planning what he would do with his body, the angle of the harpoon. He would have to use the animal’s own strength and weight against itself, as Masai hunters do with lions. The Masai hunter provokes the lion to charge him, and at the last instant he plants the butt of his spear in the ground, with the point angled toward the lion, and he kneels behind the spear: the lion runs onto the spear and impales itself.
The bird struck at him with its beak. As the strike came, Rick jammed the harpoon’s butt at an angle into the ground with the point aimed upward at the bird. He took his hand off the harpoon and threw himself forward, diving under the bird’s chest to get out of the way.
The harpoon caught the bird in the neck as the bird pecked down at Rick. With a barbed tip honed to greater fineness than a surgical needle, and drenched with poison, the weapon pierced the bird’s neck, breaking through the skin, and the barb stuck there. The bird backed off with the harpoon dangling from its neck. It shook
