resolutely towards the gate, and David saw the footprints in the
floodlights, Debra's and the big masculine prints which ran after them.
As Zulu crossed the yard, David turned back into his office. The
lantern was missing from its shelf, but there was a five-cell flashlight
near the back. He shoved it into his pocket and grabbed a handful of
shotgun shells.
Then he went quickly to the gun cabinet and unlocked it. He snatched
the Purdey shotgun from the rack and loaded it as he ran.
Zulu was staggering along the path beyond the gates, and David hurried
after him.
Johann Akkers was no longer a human being, he had become an animal. The
spectacle of the running quarry had roused the predator's single-minded
passion to chase and drag down and kill, yet it was seasoned with a
feline delight in torment. He was playing with his wounded dragging
prey, running it when he could have ended it, drawing it out, postponing
the climax, the final consuming thrill of the kill.
The moment came at last, some deep atavistic sense of the ritual of the
hunt, for all sport killing has its correct ceremony, and Akkers knew it
must end now.
He came up behind the running figure and reached out to take a twist of
the thick dark hair in the crippled claw of his hand, wrapping it with a
quick movement about his wrist and jerking back her head, laying open
the long pale throat for the knife.
She turned upon him with a strength and ferocity he had not anticipated.
Her body was hard and strong and supple, and now that she could place
him she drove at him with the wild terror of a hunted thing.
He was unprepared, her attack took him off-balance, and he went over
backwards with her on top of him, and he dropped the knife and the
lantern into the grass to protect his eyes, for she was tearing at them
with long sharp nails. He felt them rip into his nose and cheek, and
she screeched like a cat, for she was also an animal in this moment.
He freed the stiff claw from the tangle of her hair, and he drew it
back, holding her off with his right hand and he struck her.
It was like a wooden club, stiff and hard and without feeling. A single
blow with it had stunned the labrador and broken his jaw. It hit her
across the temple, a sound like an axe swung at a tree trunk.
It knocked all the fight out of her, and he came up on his knees,
holding her with his good hand and with the other he clubbed her
mercilessly, beat her head back and across with a steady rhythm. In the
light of the fallen lantern, the black blood spurted from her nose, and
the blows cracked against her skull, steady and unrelenting. Long after
she was still and senseless he continued to beat her. Then at last he
let her drop, and he stood up. He went to the lantern and played the
beam in the grass. The knife glinted up at him.
There is an ancient ceremony with which a hunt should end. The
culminating ceremony of the gralloch, when the triumphant huntsman slits
open the paunch of his game, and thrusts his hand into the opening to
draw out the still-warm viscera.
Johan Akkers picked the knife out of the grass and set down the lantern
so the beam fell upon Debra's supine figure.
