The Fear In Yesterday's rings

front of you. I hope I never know you that well. How would I maintain my mystique?'

'Harper, this is really no time to worry about your modesty or your mystique. I promise I won't peek or listen. I don't want you to get out of the car.'

'You haven't seen or heard anything, have you?'

'No, but that doesn't mean there's nothing out there.'

'I have to go, Robby. I'll only be a minute.'

'All right,' I said, reaching for the key in the ignition, 'just hold on a little longer. Let me drive ahead a few hundred yards to the top of the hill up there where I can get a better view.'

I turned the key in the ignition. The engine of the old Plymouth ground and whined, but didn't start. I shut off the ignition, gave it a rest for thirty seconds, and tried it again, with the same result. Cursing under my breath, I pumped the accelerator-and knew I'd flooded the engine when I smelled gasoline.

Harper sighed, shifted in her seat. 'I'll be all right, Robby. Don't worry. There's nothing out there.'

When Harper raised her right arm from her side where she had been cradling it and reached for the door handle, I could see that the flesh of her wrist was a mottled gray, swollen from wrist to elbow to more than the diameter of her hand. I grabbed her left arm, pulled her across the seat to me as I felt my heart begin to pound.

'Harper, you've been bitten! Jesus Christ!'

She apparently didn't have the strength to struggle, for she simply slumped against my shoulder, weakly nodded her head. 'It got me when I was trying to get it off the second man's neck. Careless of me.'

'I have to get you to a hospital!'

'Too. . late, Robby. I mean, it would have been too late hours ago. There's nothing you, or anybody else, can do for me. There's no specific anti-krait venom in the United States. If the people at the hospital knew what they were doing, the first thing they'd do is put in an emergency call for an airlift of a pint or so of Harper Rhys-Whitney's blood to use as an antitoxin serum. Well, I already have more of Harper Rhys-Whitney's blood than anybody else, so there's no sense in my going to a hospital. I told you I've been bitten dozens of times before, Robby. I have resistance. If I was going to die, you'd have found my corpse over there in the bushes beside the two men. I'm having an allergic reaction to the venom, but it will pass. I'm not going to die, I promise you-but i am going to severely embarrass myself if you don't let me out of this car so I can go to the bathroom.'

'Damn it!' I shouted, again trying-and failing-to get the Plymouth's engine to turn over. 'I'm taking you to the hospital anyway! Just as soon as I can get this fucking car started!'

Harper shook her head. 'Not a good idea, Robby. By the time we find a hospital, the police are likely to have found those two men over by the bushes-and they're liable to find out quickly that they both died of snakebite. Do you want to try to explain to the police how I happened to have been bitten by the same kind of poisonous snake?' She pulled away from me, pressed down the handle on the passenger's door. 'Now, I've got to go to the bathroom. Don't leave without me.'

'Harper!' I said, once again grabbing her left arm and yanking her back toward me just as she shoved the door open. 'I just don't want to take the ch-!'

The juggernaut of fur, fangs, claws, and bunched muscles hurtled through the area in space where Harper's torso had been just before I'd pulled her back, and I heard the distinct click of fangs snapping on empty space just before the lobox crashed into the side of the door, driving it back and springing it off its hinges. The metal's screech mingled with a sound from the lobox I had never heard before, a sound other men may have heard only a brief moment before they died, a kind of high-pitched, almost human-sounding cry that was somewhere between a growl and a roar.

The lobox bounced off the door, its killing scream turning to a yelp of pain, surprise, and frustration. It hit the ground just outside the door and lay there on its side, momentarily stunned, as I desperately grabbed for the nearest gun on the seat, the Colt. I sprawled across the seat, atop Harper, in order to get a better shot at the lobox, aimed the weapon dead center at the animal's head, and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened; I had forgotten to deactivate the safety mechanism after Harper had declined the gun.

As I swiped at the safety catch with my left hand, a second, tawny head suddenly appeared in the doorway, its saber fangs only inches from my face. Now, with the animal in a killing rage, the thick ruff around its neck stood on end all around the head with the golden, curiously human eyes, reminding me of a hooded cobra.

Not one but two loboxes had been primed and sent, one for Harper and one for me. With its extended ruff, the head of the lobox in front of me filled the entire doorway, blocking the sun.

The lobox snapped at me just as I managed to draw my head back out of the way. I released the safety catch on the Colt, brought the gun up, and fired. The report of the weapon in the closed space slammed against my eardrums, and I felt a stabbing pain in both ears. The head was gone-but I knew I hadn't hit anything; the beast, apparently recognizing the danger posed by the gun, had, with incredible quickness and agility, ducked and bounded away a split second before I had fired the bullet that would otherwise have gone right into its gaping maw and exited through the back of its skull.

Something thudded hard against the side window on the driver's side, right behind me, shaking the car and cracking the glass. Instantly, I twisted around, raised the Colt, closed my eyes, and fired. Powdered glass sprayed over my face and chest, but there was no spurting blood, no animal howl of pain; once again, the lobox had bounded away just before I had fired. I desperately wiped the debris away from my eyes, sat up, switched the gun to my left hand, and used my right to push Harper off the seat, down into the well beneath the dashboard. Then, in a near panic, I blindly pumped three bullets into the open space on the passenger's side when I thought I caught a flash of movement. But there was nothing there. I swiped more powdered glass away from my face, picked up the automatic, then lay down on my back on the seat, my cheek pressed against a section of the steering wheel, as I aimed the Colt at the empty space just above my head, and the automatic out the open door.

It sounded like a hive of bees was buzzing around inside the car, but I knew that it was just ringing in my ears from the firing of the gun. I could feel blood trickling out of my left ear, but it was impossible to tell whether it came from a shattered eardrum or a nick from a stray piece of glass.

'Cover your ears!' I shouted over the ringing in my own head as I put my hand on Harper's shoulder and shoved her even further down into the cramped space under the dashboard.

I heard a thump, and then the scratching of claws on metal at the rear. I glanced between the seats, saw the head and shoulders of one of the loboxes standing on the trunk of the car. I poked the Colt between the seats, squeezed off a shot. I missed the lobox, which had darted off the car as I'd aimed, but the rear windshield exploded under the impact of the bullets.

The Colt was empty. I shoved it aside, gripped the.45 automatic with both hands, swept it around me in a series of arcs-back and forth, up and down, the empty spaces to my rear, the side, and at the back of the car.

Harper was sobbing hysterically, but there was nothing I could do at the moment to comfort her. Mongo the Magnificent was, I thought, currently being outsmarted by two overachieving animals, ancestors of the wolf. So far, in what was probably less than a minute, the two beasts, using their incredible agility, had managed to get me to shoot out most of the glass in the car, removing that barrier between their fangs and our flesh. And at the same time I was using up bullets.

They couldn't intentionally be suckering me, I thought. Two animals couldn't possibly have the intelligence, or the communications skills, to coordinate an attack like that; they couldn't plan to make me keep wasting ammunition until we were defenseless and they could easily get at us. The damn things couldn't possibly be thinking things out, working together to inexorably close a killing trap.

Or could they?

I remembered Nate Button's photographs of the recently discovered cave paintings at Lascaux, the utter terror radiating from those primitive people's rendering of the hunter-killer beast they had probably worshipped as a god. .

Humans appeared to have a primal fear of wolves, I thought, and now I had a pretty good idea where it had come from.

Wolves hunted in packs, and I recalled that they had been observed to cooperate in complex ways that were astounding to their human observers. If wolves cooperated, why not loboxes? And why should I be surprised if loboxes did it a hell of a lot better? These two had, after all, sneaked up on us, totally undetected, during the night, recognized that Harper and I were in the car, and then waited patiently just outside the car for one of us to make a