The Library at Mount Char Part 13

"Eshteeeve?"

"Um...yeah," Steve said. "That's me."

The big guy continued running the knife up and down Steve's cheek, not quite hard enough to draw blood. Then, with a movement so fast that Erwin's eye could not track it, the weighted end of the chain smashed out and obliterated Dorn's lower jaw. It literally disappeared. Probably part of it was mashed back into his throat, but other bits scattered hither and yon.

"Gubboy," the big guy said to Steve. "You come."

From the look in his eyes, Dorn realized that something had happened but not exactly what. He reached up and probed tenderly at the bottom half of his face. About the time he realized something was missing the first drops of blood began to rain down on his s.h.i.+rt. His eyes widened. "OOOGH!" he said. "OOOOOOOGH!" He began bouncing up and down on the bench like a little kid who needs to use the bathroom. "OOOGH! OOOOOOGH!"

Both Steve and the big guy were looking at Dorn, Steve in horror, the big guy with a slight, amused smile that brought out his dimples. After a moment of this he began to imitate Dorn's bouncing. He glanced at Steve and Erwin the way a man will when he is laughing among friends. He pointed at Dorn and said, "Oogh! Oogh!"

Steve didn't seem to notice. His eyes were fixed on the ruin of Dorn's face. The big guy's smile faded a bit. He turned to Erwin. He didn't like what he saw there, either. His smile disappeared. He shrugged. A split second later the spear on the other end of the chain flashed out and buried itself to the hilt in Dorn's eye socket. The pointy end of the blade poked out the back of Dorn's skull, yellow and b.l.o.o.d.y. After an interval just long enough for Erwin to register the fine silver chain running from the hilt to the big guy's hand it flashed back again. Dorn fell forward, his head hitting the concrete bench with a solid clunk. Blood and aqueous humor leaked from his eye and began puddling.

The silence seemed very loud.

The big guy savored the looks on their faces for a moment. He gave Erwin a wink, then began to spin the weighted end of the chain again.

Erwin realized he was about to die. Then his mind-his clever little mind, which had been so good to him over the years-came through again. He looked at the big guy's ridiculous dress-brown loafers with the toes cut out, purple tutu-a tutu? Da f.u.c.k?-flak jacket, probably Israeli, and red tie. He thought of the woman who had done the bank robbery in a bathrobe and a cowboy hat. "Say," he said, "you wouldn't happen to know a chick named Carolyn, would you?"

The big guy raised his eyebrow in surprise. "Carolyn?" The rotation of the chain slowed, just a little.

Erwin, whose instincts had been honed to exquisite sharpness through a decade-long a.s.sociation with murderous men, thought, The trick now is not to show panic. If he sees fear, it will excite him. "Yeah," he said casually. "Carolyn. Lisa, too."

"Wussay Carolyn?"

"Eh?" He put his hand to his ear. "Say again, chum?"

"Wut...say...Carolyn." He wiggled the knife for emphasis.

With a knot in his stomach that reminded him of the one and only time he had gone deep-sea fis.h.i.+ng and hooked a "big'un," Erwin said, "Oh yeah, Carolyn and me go waaaaaay back. If she's told me one time she's told me a thousand, 'Erwin, if you ever need anything, anything at all, you just have to say my name-Carolyn-and I'll come a-running.' We're real good friends, me and Carolyn.'"

The big guy scrunched up his face, confused. "Carolyn?"

"Oh yeah." Erwin nodded. "Carolyn."

The big guy narrowed his eyes suspiciously. "n.o.bununga?"

"Yup. n.o.bunaga. Him too, yup."

He realized immediately that he had said the wrong thing. Not n.o.bu-nag-a, n.o.bu-nun-ga. Ah, f.u.c.k. The big guy's eyes narrowed. He resumed spinning his pyramid. Erwin was thinking, When he throws it I'll twist right, twist right and grab the chain if I can but he's so f.u.c.king fast- The big guy blinked. He leaned forward, brow furrowed. Then his eyes flew open wide, reminding Erwin of how Rogers's brother looked when he recognized Erwin's name on the form. He pointed. "You...Erwin?"

"Umm..."

"Natanz?" The big guy held his hand to his shoulder as if it were wounded, then pantomimed working a squad automatic weapon, sweeping it back and forth, singlehandedly suppressing an attack by a vastly superior force.

Erwin considered his answer in light of the Israeli flak jacket, the guy's obvious insanity. Ah, f.u.c.k it, he thought. "Yeah. Natanz."

The big guy drew in breath. He stopped spinning the pyramid, then snapped to something almost but not quite like the US military's version of attention-his feet were a bit too wide, his chest poked out a bit too far for the Army. Then, holding the spear perfectly vertical with his left hand-parade rest?-he raised his right fist and banged it on his chest. He said something in a language Erwin had never heard before.

Erwin wasn't going to salute him back-not this guy-but he nodded again. One of them days.

Down the hallway he heard a clatter of bullets falling on the tile floor, a soft curse, the distinct sound of a rifle being c.o.c.ked. AR-15, prolly. The cops are still trying to fight back. Both Erwin and the big guy glanced back at the door. The big guy frowned, not liking what he saw out there. Then, just like that, he punched Steve in the jaw. Steve slumped, dazed but not completely out of it. The big guy slung him over his shoulder. The two of them disappeared out into the hall.

Erwin heard gunfire, then screams, then a deep, booming laugh. He felt alive in a way he hadn't since Afghanistan. His veins were thrumming with energy. He got up and went looking for a gun.

The rifle he'd heard in the hall-it was an AR-15-was all bent-up. He found a pistol in the locker room, but by then the big guy was gone. Steve was gone with him. Erwin followed a trail of bare, b.l.o.o.d.y footprints down the hall. The security door was blocked open by the fat lady with the dirty feet. A hole the size of his hand gaped in her chest. Through it he could see a big blood vessel, probably her aorta, all shredded-up.

The skinny girl with the Skynyrd tattoo, apparently unharmed, knelt beside her, staring down with a blank expression on her face. "Bev?" she said. "Beverly?"

Erwin thought about telling the skinny girl that Beverly was with Ronnie Van Zant and Elvis, but he wasn't sure how that would go over. He settled for patting her on the shoulder.

The lobby was drenched with blood. Intestines dangled from the metal chairs, the light fixtures, the counter. Thick splinters of bulletproof gla.s.s lay strewn across the floor. He had seen that stuff break before, just once, when an Iraqi limousine got hit by a depleted uranium slug from an A-10 Thunderbolt. He made his way through the lobby, checking for pulses and finding none. The older cop he'd seen smoking outside had been decapitated. If his head were still around, Erwin didn't see it.

He stood over the dead cop for a long minute, lips pursed, considering. Lightning flashed off in the west. Someone in the lobby was screaming. He bent over and fished around in the dead cop's front pocket and retrieved a pack of Marlboro Lights and a Bic, then made his way back to the chapel.

Once inside he kicked the door shut. He moved to a spot where he could look at the painting and slid down along the wall until his a.s.s. .h.i.t the floor. The buzz of the fluorescent lights reminded him of a cloud of flies around a corpse. In a few minutes there would be sirens, ambulances, SWAT teams, reports. He shook out a smoke, lit it, and took a deep drag, relis.h.i.+ng the head rush from the nicotine.

On the bench in front of him sat the newspaper picture of Carolyn on the water slide. In the background of the twenty-five-year-old photo someone who looked an awful lot like Steve Hodgson, aged about ten, waited for his turn. s.h.i.+t, Erwin thought. I really wanted to ask him about that. Up on the wall Jesus-or whomever-held his hands out, keeping the dark things of creation at bay. He heard the rumble again, from the east, closer now.

Thunder.

Chapter 5.

The Luckiest Chicken in the World

I.

"Wow," Aliane said. "You weren't kidding. You do have lions in your backyard."

"Yeah," Marcus said. "Just like in Scarface!" He grinned, exposing what Aliane judged to be about twenty thousand Brazilian reis' worth of gold grills on his teeth.

How much would that be in dollars? More than Aliane's mother had made in a year of scrubbing floors, anyway. Aliane was only vaguely familiar with Scarface, but she could tell from his tone she was supposed to be impressed. "Ooooh, baby," she said, smiling, and ran a fingernail down his forearm.

She could still hear the party a couple hundred meters behind them-thumping ba.s.s, laughter, people splas.h.i.+ng in the pool-but they were far enough away that she could no longer see Marcus's mansion through the trees. They stood on a concrete walkway between two deep, lighted pits filled with fake rocks and a few bushes. Marcus faced her, standing a little bit inside of the invisible we're-just-friends line.

"The big male is Dresden. That one"-he pointed at the one on her left-"is called Nagasaki. Naga for short."

"I thought lions were supposed to have a mane?"

Marcus shook his head. "Only the males. Don't you watch the Discovery Channel?"

Aliane forced a smile. Growing up she was too poor to have a TV. "She's small, too."

"She's only about half-grown. We think she's his daughter."

She turned and looked into the other pit, the one with the male. The sound of their voices had disturbed his sleep. He was awake now, studying her with unblinking yellow eyes. She s.h.i.+vered and stepped in a little closer to Marcus. "He's really big."

"I'm living large." Marcus puffed his cigar and spread his arms wide, a gesture that took in the lion pit, the forty landscaped acres, the ten-foot concrete wall surrounding the grounds. Marcus-Little Z to the hip-hop cognoscenti-lived on a Connecticut estate that had once been the weekend getaway of a hedge-fund manager. He put his arm around Aliane's shoulders and pulled her forward to look down at the male.

"Hey, you want me to wake her up too?"

"No!" Aliane said, a little too quickly. "No...I mean, that's OK. Let it sleep." The big lion put his head back down, closed his eyes. She snuggled in close, stifling a cigar-smoke sneeze.

"What's the matter?"

"Nothing." But when she looked at the sleeping lion, some deep part of her stirred. Before she'd become a model she lived in a small village in Brazil, near the Panta.n.a.l. Jaguar attacks were not unheard-of. A boy in her fourth-grade cla.s.s had been killed. Once she saw a farmer with his scalp hanging loose, his face drenched with blood. "Can they, you know, get out?"

Marcus shook his head. "No way. That pit is fifteen feet deep. You can't tell from up here, but the walls slope back towards the inside. So, like, there's no way to get a grip or anything. Ain't no way they're climbing out of there."

"Oh. Well...good," she said, trying to sound convinced. "Wow, baby. That's really cool. Can we go back to the party?"

"In a minute. Gotta feed them first." He grinned. "You wanna go fis.h.i.+ng?"

"Fis.h.i.+ng?"

"Come with me." He circled around the side of the pit to a trail that led deeper into the woods.

"I don't know, Marcus...it's pretty dark." She glanced back at the house. The party was in full swing. Marcus's latest single-"Pimp Hand"-was blaring out over the stereo. "I'm out of wine."

"We'll get you some more wine in a minute. Come on, you really want to see this. It's the funniest thing ever."

The forest behind him was very dark, but his watch was a Patek Philippe. And he's going to put me in a video. Maybe.

"OK," she said. "Fine."

II.

The big lion's dream was the same every night. Golden gra.s.s brushed at his whiskers. The breeze carried the scent of wildebeest and zebra. The sun hung low on the horizon, and the shadows of the baobab trees lay long.

Home.

In Dresden's dream his daughter was still very small. She paced him as he walked, moving in his shadow just as Dresden had done with his own father. He was teaching her the rudiments of their craft: the location of the drinking holes, the proper way to drift in from downwind of one's prey, the words to show respect to the Forest G.o.d after a kill. It was a good memory, a good dream.

But then it turned.

Dresden froze in his tracks, one forepaw hanging just above the ground. He perked his ears up and leaned forward, straining to catch a sc.r.a.p of sound carried by the breeze. Naga heard it too, deep and buzzy, a bit like a roar and a bit like the sound of angry bees except not at all like either one. It sounded like metal.

It sounded like men.

Wait, he said to Naga. Watch. She swished her tail, acknowledging the order. But Dresden was older than was common for a new father, and he had mostly forgotten what it was to be young and playful. He did not see the mischief in her eyes. He left her then, moving through the gra.s.ses, low and slow and silent. In the dream he was not afraid, not yet. But the part of him that was not dreaming ached to do something else, anything else, to take his cub and flee, to rip and tear, to shred those things that brought the sounds of men into his world. But of course he could do nothing. That was the way of this dream.

Dresden rose up in the gra.s.s to stand at his full height. His eyes glinted in the twilight, twin bright points framed by the inky shadows of his mane. The gazelle they had been stalking caught sight of him and fled. He did not care. His attention was all on the buzzing sound and, a moment later, on the brown cloud of dust that accompanied it.

Dresden watched them, uneasy. He knew of men, and he understood their guns well enough.

Then unease turned to terror. Naga had not waited. Naga had not watched. Instead she approached the men with all the bravado of youth. As he watched, a man raised a gun to his shoulder and, with a puff and a crack, Naga fell. Dresden, roaring, charged across the veldt for the last time, not caring about the danger, wanting only to seize the prey that dared hurt his daughter, to rend and tear, to shred its life.

Instead, mid-charge, he watched as the men raised the sticks to their shoulders, felt the sting of the needles in his back, his neck. Suddenly he could no longer stand.

Dresden, dreaming, understood he would wake in a distant land, wake in a high-walled trap, slick beyond climbing, tall beyond jumping. There would be no escape. The rest of his life stretched out before him, worse than any nightmare. Worse, they would take Naga as well. He had failed his cub. That knowledge bore down on his heart like a stone.

He and his cub would wake under strange stars, and all the days and nights of her life would be poisoned by the sounds and smells of men.

- NOW, SEASONS LATER and an ocean away, Dresden jerked awake. He saw humans in the pit with him, three of them, very close.

Dresden wondered if he might still be dreaming. He raised his head, sniffed the night air. It stank of smoke. The horizon glowed with unnatural light. Not far away, machines roared and clanked. This is real, then. He gathered his feet under him and stood, rumbling a little deep in his chest. His craft stirred in him for the first time in a very long while. If they came just a bit closer, he would spring. If not, then he would sidle up to them, pretending to be- "Good evening," one of the three said. "Please pardon our intrusion. We mean no disrespect." He spoke in the language of the hunt, spoke it perfectly, though perhaps with the tiniest hint of tiger accent. "Are you the one they call the Thorn of Dawn?"

Dresden blinked. Thorn of Dawn was the name his father had given him. He thought he would never hear it again. Astonished, he swished his tail. Yes.

"Good. I thought that it might be you. I am called Michael. I hunted for a time with the pride of the Red Wind." He glanced around the pit. "It was there that I heard of your troubles."

For a moment, Dresden was speechless. The Red Wind lived a long run or so to the west of his home. They were fierce, and well respected. Hunted with them? A man? After a moment's consideration he made the sound he might have made if he saw another lion in the distance: Who are you? What do you want?

"That is a bit involved. Let me begin by saying that I am the adopted son of Ablakha, and apprentice to the tiger n.o.bununga. I bear n.o.bununga's scent, and hunt at his side. This is my brother David, who is the slave of murder, and my sister Carolyn, also of the house of Ablakha. We come bearing news of n.o.bununga. May we approach?"

Ablakha? Dresden knew the name. He was a heretic, an enemy of the Forest G.o.d. But n.o.bununga was a different matter. He was an ancient tiger, said to be the ruler of all the forests of the world. Dresden padded over to the man and sniffed him, just as he might have done when receiving a fellow lion. And, sure enough, the man did smell of tiger. Hmm.

Dresden decided to err on the side of courtesy-if even half of what he heard about n.o.bununga was true, that would be the wisest course. He froze and allowed himself to be scented in turn. The man gave his mane a quick sniff and backed away. This was exactly the proper thing for a junior hunter to do in these circ.u.mstances.

Dresden furrowed his brow. He had no love for men in general, and Ablakha was an enemy of G.o.d. But each night he spent under these strange stars, Dresden had prayed himself to sleep. He did not bemoan the fate that had fallen to him, did not protest that his lifelong piety was rewarded in this way. He asked nothing for himself. He prayed only that his cub be given a chance at life beyond this cage. Each night Dresden begged G.o.d to grant him this one prayer, to accept his own life as forfeit. He could not think how this might possibly be related...but G.o.d had surprised him before.

Dresden settled back on his haunches and lifted his forepaw, gave it a quick lick. This was a respectful gesture, if not quite a welcome.

Despite himself, he was curious to hear what the man had to say.