“Bitch, how does it feel to be dead?” he asked her.
She only had one move, which made choosing much easier.
Bending her elbow sharply, she brought her right hand back to her left shoulder, groped upward a couple of inches, found the handles of the knives, picked the big one. It was almost wedged in place by Zakir’s weight, but she jerked it free with a convulsive movement. Then, without pause, she reversed the movement and stabbed straight backward, aiming for the sound of his voice.
He gagged on his own scream and rolled off her. As he moved she felt the knife handle twist in her hand. She maintained her grip on it, jerked it out, felt blood spray. She planted both hands and pushed herself up on hands and knees, then rolled away from him, ending up seated on her haunches.
Zakir was kneeling on the ground with both hands clapped over his mouth. His forearms were turning red. Blood began to stream off one elbow, then the other.
She heard an exclamation. Not from Zakir, who had been robbed of the power of speech. She looked up to see Sayed standing there in his Crocs, no more than ten feet away, holding the shotgun slack in his hands, staring in horror at Zakir.
She was definitely within that gun’s killing range now. She had half her own weight strapped to her back, and she was sitting down, immobilized by the pack.
For the first time in quite a while she didn’t have any particular idea as to what she should do. She was tired of coming up with ideas.
She and Sayed stared at each other for a few moments. He glanced down at her hand and saw the bloody knife.
He probably wanted to go to the aid of Zakir, who was slumping back against a tree, deflating as blood and breath ran out of him. But he didn’t want to come in range of the knife. He ought to just blow her away with that shotgun. But he couldn’t quite bring himself to do it.
So it was a standoff.
Something flashed through the air behind him. Sort of like a bird, except that it weighed about as much as Zula. But the quality of its movement—a strange, almost supernatural combination of speed and silence—was akin to that of a bird.
Sayed went down on his face as if he had been struck by a car. The shotgun flew out of his hands and went bouncing and rolling across the ground toward Zula.
She was so preoccupied with that one detail that she saw nothing else until she had jerked her arms free from the pack straps and flung herself forward to scrabble the weapon up out of the thick layer of old brown pine needles and leaves in which it had come to rest.
Then she stared up into the golden face of a huge feline, regarding her from perhaps six feet away. The animal had blood on its fangs. It had planted both of its feet on Sayed’s back; each of its claws was embedded in a spreading disk of blood. But most of the blood came from the back of Sayed’s neck, which had been destroyed; the animal had struck him with a flying leap, and bitten all the way through his cervical spine, in the same instant.
She remembered that she had a shotgun in her hands. She aimed it at the cougar. For her mind, belatedly switching into animal taxonomy mode, had identified this as one. The same one, no doubt, that had been skulking around the camp last night and going after the raccoons earlier. She wondered if Sayed had had the presence of mind to chamber a shell and flick the safety off. She pulled back with her right hand, saw the yellow gleam of a shotgun shell in the breech, pushed it closed. Glanced back up at the cougar. Found the safety with her thumb, glanced down to see it had been left on, flicked it up until a red dot showed. Red, you’re dead. Looked back up at the cougar. It was making no effort to come after her, but it was definitely paying close attention, snarling, making it clear she wasn’t wanted.
It was guarding its kill.
Keeping the shotgun in her right hand, aimed at the cougar, she squatted down, thrust her left arm through a pack strap, and heaved the burden up onto her back. This irritated the cougar, sending it into a little fit of squawling and posturing. But Zula was definitely backing away now, increasing the distance.
Something caught her knee. She saw with horror that it was Zakir’s bloody paw, not so much trying to hold her back as imploring her for aid. She kicked loose from him and moved away. Not until she was perhaps a hundred feet distant did she shoulder the pack properly and fasten its hip belt.
Her hearing had gone all funny during this, but when it went back to normal, she noted that Ershut or someone seemed to have gotten to the bell and stifled it. It was still making a dim pocking noise, but the bell wasn’t clanging anymore and probably couldn’t be heard from more than a few hundred yards’ distance.
This made it possible to hear two sounds that had previously been obscured by the ringing of the bell. One, behind Zula now, was Zakir screaming. Apparently he had got his voice working again. His cries had an inchoate gargling sound. The other was a motor coming down the road from the direction of Elphinstone.
Zula was pretty sure it was a Harley-Davidson.
Chet was coming. He had heard the fire bell and was coming to see what was the matter.
Zula had drawn him here by setting the fire, and now they were going to kill him.
She heard Jahandar’s voice, shouting into a walkie-talkie or a phone. As he spoke, Zula caught sight of him retreating from the dam, taking up a position behind a corner of the main Schloss buildings.
Chet wasn’t in view yet, but the headlight of his chopper was illuminating the trees along the road perhaps half a mile away, and she could hear the engine throttling up and down as he took the familiar curves.
FROM THE DAY that Chet had made the decision to settle down and bind his fortune to that of Dodge and his crazy Schloss project, not an hour had gone by without his thinking, and usually worrying, about some aspect of the building and its grounds. This was his life now. It was not a bad life. But part of the job was getting up in the middle of the night and running into the place to put out fires.
Not literally. There had never been a serious fire in the place and he doubted that there ever would be, given the capabilities of the sprinkler system that they had, at shocking expense, installed in every room of the complex. But it was useless against
The one exception was Mud Month, when all the staff went on vacation. Nothing could be delegated then; either Chet or Dodge had to be on call 24/7 until they all came back.
Dodge was there now. Had been for a few days. This had given Chet an opportunity to relax, catch up on his reading, go on a few motorcycle rides with the surviving members of the Septentrion Paladins. He had just returned from one such ride, up the west shore of Kootenay Lake, a few hours before sunset. After grilling a steak and killing half a bottle of cabernet, he had collapsed into bed early and slept well. But in the hour before dawn he had found himself lying awake, convinced he was hearing something from up the valley: a jangling bell.
That fucking sprinkler system had sprung another leak.
It couldn’t be an actual fire. Had there been an actual fire, the alarm system would have detected it, summoned the fire department, and sent a text message to his phone. Sirens would be screaming by his cabin already. And Dodge would be calling him.
No, something must have whacked a sprinkler head and set the thing going. Right now water was spraying in torrents around one of the Schloss’s rooms. It had happened before. It was always a huge mess. It was probably Dodge, up early in the morning, chasing a stray bat around with a badminton racket, flailing in the dark, not thinking about the delicate sprinkler heads. Now he was alone in the Schloss in the wee hours, dark and wet and furious and humiliated, too proud to call for help.
Chet dragged himself out of bed, peed, and pulled his motorcycle leathers on over his pajamas. Not very dignified, but only Dodge would see him, and he had no secrets from Dodge. He strode out into the patch of gravel between his cabin and the road. The chopper was there. It was dirty and tired, needed to have its oil changed. Riding it through the dark, he would be uncomfortable and cold. A sane man would take the SUV that was parked right next to it. But Chet on a whim had decided to ride the bike. What the hell, he was up anyway and about to spend the whole day dealing with Dodge’s mess. It couldn’t get a hell of a lot more uncomfortable than that.
He bestrode the Harley, kicked it into life, fishtailed it around in the gravel, and headed out onto the little
