‘I’ll d-, do whatever I can to h-, help you,’ he murmured, his voice cracking, ‘when we s-, safe. I p-, promise you that, Paola, I promise you that.’
Paola either did not hear Daekwon’s words, or, if she did, she did not understand them or care. She turned her head towards him for a moment, but it seemed as if she were staring right through him, her eyes like those of a zealous cultic devotee ensnared in the oblivious rapture of a trance.
Daekwon bit his lip, waves of powerful emotion rushing through his core, and he jumped up, slipped his limbs through his harness and then scrambled up the boulder formation, where he clipped himself to Lightning Bird. He and the shaman took one final, soulful look at both Zakaria, who was in his human form and getting suited up in his wingsuit, and Paola, who was still lying on the ground shaking violently with shock, and then both of them vanished into the abyss.
The old warrior knew that despite the pressing imperativeness of their situation, the girl would not be getting up and complying with his instructions any time soon, and he could not afford to try to convince or coerce her into obeying his orders. Acutely aware of the seconds rushing by and what the passing time meant in terms of their rapidly diminishing chances of survival, he pulled the untouched AK-47 off of her shoulders and scooped her up, and then slung her over his shoulders in a fireman’s carry. After picking up the rifle with his free hand he started scrambling up the boulders. His beastwalker senses picked up the sound of enemy troops advancing unchecked through the forest, so he half-turned, the AK-47 gripped in one hand, and let off a burst of hammering fire at the source of the movement. A raspy yelp of pain told him that at least one of the blindly fired shots had struck home. Dripping with sweat and breathing hard, he reached the top of the peak and the edge of the cliff. At that moment a burst of M-16 fire erupted from the trees, and the spurt of bullets kicked up dust and rock fragments around Zakaria’s feet. He knew that he had a second or two to make a decision; he could either guarantee his own survival by leaving Paola behind and jumping on his own, or risk both of their lives by attempting the wingsuit flight without her strapped to him.
The former choice would be certain death for her, and even though the latter was virtually a guaranteed death for both of them, Zakaria could not condemn this innocent child to death to save himself.
There was a third option though; an ugly one, perhaps, but a choice that may prove kinder in the long run. Zakaria quietly bought the smoking barrel of the AK-47 up to the underside of Paola’s chin. The teen was half delirious and didn’t even seem to notice the warm steel pressing into her flesh. Swallowing slowly, with a maddeningly itchy bead of sweat inching a tortuous passage down the back of his neck, Zakaria eased his finger onto the trigger. One quick squeeze and she’d be gone; no more pain, no more terror, no more suffering … just pure serenity and eternal peace. For a second of dizzying confusion Zakaria danced this savage tarantella in his mind, but it was only a temporary window of craziness; he could not kill this innocent child.
‘Great Mother,’ he gasped, hurling the rifle off the cliff, ‘be with us now, I beg you.’ Then, as a number of Huntsmen troops charged out of the trees, their rifles shouldered, he slung Paola onto his back, first tucking her left arm around his neck and then pulling her legs around his waist. ‘Hold tight, child, hold tight,’ he said.
‘Cut the fuckers down!’ one of the soldiers roared.
Before any of the troops could fire, Zakaria departed the mountaintop in a leaping swan dive. The surging force of acceleration yanked him earthwards like a boulder catapulted from a titan’s sling, and the broad rock-littered waters of the river below were in one second a fiery ribbon gleaming in the distance below, and the next a broad and ravenous highway of wildly rushing water, yawned rapidly wider, eager to swallow the pair of them up and pulverise their madly accelerating bodies to pulp. The lift created by Zakaria’s wingsuit allowed him to arc his vertical plummet into a hundred-mile-per-hour horizontal glide, but maintaining his flight path and a sense of stability in the air with the girl positioned awkwardly on his back was proving immensely difficult. Already the rippling wind was buffeting his wings with a ruthless wildness, threatening to flip his body into a tumbling spin from which there would be no recovery, only death for the both of them. Screaming out with the effort of keeping his arms locked and his body rigid, Zakaria swooped hawk-like around a sweeping bend, hurtling through a gap between two steep-sided, heavily wooded mountains. He was seconds away from losing control completely, and as he started to prepare for the next bend in the river, soaring above its churning waters and following its course as if it were a liquid road, a sinking realisation they weren’t going to make it hit him like a sledgehammer blow to the chest. The irresistible forces of physics could not be fought, not by the strongest muscles of the most powerful creature on the planet, and as strong as Zakaria was, he was not superhuman. And, what was more, Paola’s weakening arm was slipping off his neck, and the tightness of the grip of her thighs around his waist was slackening at an alarming pace.
The buffeting was now like hundreds of invisible fists and boots, all stomping and kicking at full force at once. As he started to
