* * *
Vessey shuttles split wood into the lobby of Esther, grunting and aching, cursing his bones that grate and whine like chalk on rock.
Egon stands, barks.
“What is it, old boy? Lunchtime already?”
The lobby door flies open and Merced, heaving, leans against the doorway. He bends over, hands on knees, the door smacking him in the rear. His alpaca face hoods his long black hair. To the leafy floor, he says, “Vess. Vess.”
“Merced.” Vessey sits on the old, leaky generator and waits for the spew of nonsense. If only Merced had a pull-cord and a choke to close.
“Un autogol, Vess, un autogol. ¡Ay, Dios mío! Un autogol.”
Egon barks.
“Con permiso, Egon, usted perro digno.”
“Asseyez, Egon.” When Egon sits, Vessey says, “What the hell’s an autogol?”
“Un autogol. ¿Cómo se dice? Autogol. Auto. Own! Own goal!”
“You were playing soccer?”
“It’s football, Vess, and, no, I hurt la bonita.”
“Bonita. That’s little bone right? You hurt your pecker?”
“¡Ay, carajo! Not my pecker, Vess, the pretty Latina.”
“She’s here?”
“Aquí, yes, damn.”
“Start from the start. In English. You speak perfect English. Hurt how?”
“My short-timer’s stick. Pulled her right open. Guts come pouring out. Pensé que iba a explotar.” He made a pouf sound, his hands expanding outward. “Thought she … shit. Don’t know what I thought, Vess. Her jogging vest, one of the weighted ones? This cabeza.” He fired a thumb-and-finger pistol at his temple.
“Okay, okay. Where?”
“The high trail.”
“Take me.”
He shook his head. “No way, Vess. I got to run. Voy, adios.”
“Merced, you take me this fucking instant. That’s an order. Understand?”
Merced looked through the cloudy glass of the Esther lobby for a long moment. He butted his head hard against it.
“Merced.”
Egon went to Merced, sniffed his red fingers, then licked them.
Merced looked at his hand. He nodded to the out-of-doors. “Vamanos.”
* * *
Evangelína knows a new pain, this one blue, a quickening pain, a pain that snaps her awake, yanks her from delusions of apocalyptic grandeur to deposit her in the snowy mountain woods, a pain that makes her think it’s not the world that’s ending—the end is hers alone.
Sounds made at her throat, but not by her throat, confuse her. A low rumble. She needs to get free. She flails, strikes a body. Recalls, vaguely, some instruction about fighting for her life, that playing dead was a sure way to die.
She strikes. Finds fur, fur too short to grab a fistful of. She hears screams, feels screams, and, just before she blues-out, she’s not sure if the screams she hears are hers.
An instant later, she’s back, the blue burned red. She opens her tearful eyes.
A broad brown wedge of a face, inches away. The two faces of the wayob have merged. Her papí winks at her, a jaguar fully transformed. Papí sniffs her neck. His whiskers tickle beneath her chin, just like when she was a girl. His unwinking eye, the gold of a Libertad coin.
She reaches up.
He swats away her hand with an open paw big as a sombrero. His claw snags on her coat sleeve, hung up on the band of her watch. Papí jerks away his paw and growls. He sniffs her mouth, inhaling her breath, his mouth parted. His breath rank and metallic. He licks her neck with a tongue like a sea urchin. Her neck feels nettle-stung, tingly and burning. He clamps his mouth over her throat—she can’t breathe, again goes blueblind.
She fights. Thrashes with more than she has. Draws resistance from the sacred cenote of her self.
Papí doesn’t let go. His growl vibrates her vocal cords. He growls through her.
She shoves hands into pockets. Something to fend off Papí, gentle Papí, doting Papí, Papí to be feared only when angry Papí, anything Papí, finds nothing, Papí, nothing but price tags pulled off and tucked away. She yanks at the pouches of her weight vest, fumbles, finds purchase on a weight, drops it in snow. She’s using both numb hands, searching and grasping. Each hand opens a flap and removes a weight. She’s aware of her awareness, but only because she’s losing it, her presence of mind slipping out from under her, her grip loosening on the gripped weights, one in each hand, she gazing up at the overcast, a snowflake landing and melting in a spangled blur on her open eye.
* * *
Smith arrives at the tracks she and Ray encountered going up-trail. They’re snowing over. Fresh tracks, boot tracks, come and go. She’s eager to check on Milt, both excited and saddened to convey news of E. Prince, to relay the info that Ray’s been spying for corporate interests. She’s also afraid, afraid of what she might find down in Milt’s tunnel-rat hole. She sees him stiff with rigor, stinking of the—
A dulled scream, muffled by snow, reaches her numbed ears. Could be wind. Could be the sound of frostbite setting in, her blood freezing. Unsettling, how in the silences and the noises up here, she hears all sorts of ghostly voices.
She heads away from the tracks, away from the scream, toward Masada, the snow underfoot screeching and singing like the sugar sand on Siesta Key in Sarasota.
The second scream stops her, turns her, a jolt. Her vestigial hackles rise icy under the warm hide of E. Prince. The scream is so terrifying, so dreadful, that it spurs her to sprint through snow in its direction. She’s barreling ahead before she knows what she’s doing. At a dead run, she reaches her hand to steady the holstered pistol banging her hip.
She follows the tracks. Muddle of boots, one or two pairs, snowshoes, a sled. Then out of the woods, joining the other tracks on the trail, are prints of a creature of such size that they stop Smith skidding cold, not out of fear but disbelief, she slipping and falling in snow. On her knees, she inspects the paw prints from inches away. Polar bear. Before she has time to correct this thought, another mad cry, clearer, washes over her.
She’s back on her boots and running. As the trees thin, the cries hit her as more than simple sound; the cries become as solid as the strike of a hand. The cries shove her away, try to turn her the other direction, the fear in her a physical assault.
The Florida panther stands across an opening. Fifty meters away. The great cat bends over its find, biting and pawing. A loud neon fabric, puffed green and pink. A sleeping bag. Some hiker’s camp in a clearing.
Hearing Smith, the panther turns its head. Its face, the wedge of it, is a fierce yield sign. But friendly somehow, confiding. Winking. Its open eye, across this distance, is a dot of vivid green-gold, a drop of antifreeze. The panther hisses, flashes four pink fangs. It belts out a roar like a redlined engine.
The cat’s one-eyed, same panther she saw while splitting wood. When he turns back to his camp rations, Smith retreats, places painstakingly slow steps away, careful not to show her back. Let him have his pilfered goodies. Whatever trespasser left them deserves to come back to his camp hungry and foodless. One more thing to report to Milt.
As she backs away, the panther bites and pulls, lifting the two-tone neon off the ground. Tan face buried in the neon green, sweep of black hair. Person. Smith’s vision keys in, tightens on the cat trying to drag the body into the treeline. There’s no fight, no resistance whatever, in the hiker.
Smith draws her pistol. She aims, braces, elbows bent, fires once. The recoil jumps the gun over her head. She recovers, aims at the unfazed panther, fires again.
The panther releases its bite and nearly speaks a roar, a roar more like a plaintive sentence than word of warning. A beard of venous blood, deep red, covers his chin.
Smith advances. Ground underfoot broken and rocky, made slick by melting snow.
When the panther crouches to spring at her, she fires a third round.
The panther flinches, ears flattened, but doesn’t turn, doesn’t run.
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Unsure which barrel to aim over for her last shot, she tries to recall the firing sequence. She has reloads but no time. Still too far for much accuracy. She continues advancing, sighting between the top two barrels at the panther’s chest tipped low, its body recoiled, readying to rush her and making a tighter target. Just outside range, four body-lengths maybe, she fires her final round.
The cat roars. Doesn’t withdraw. He rises and charges, kicking up a spray of snow.
* * *
When Vessey and Merced hear the first faint shot, they stop. Hearing the second shot—muffled by snowcover—they both sprint in the direction of the reports, Egon leashed and whining at Vessey’s side. The snow slows them, Vessey’s worn-away joints slowing him further. By the time the third shot’s fired, they see the gunman—gunwoman—Bellum absorbing the recoil of her pepperbox with bent arms, then moving in.
They enter the clearing, the snowcover thin. A cougar crouches over a small hiker bright as candy. Vessey can’t tell the screams of the hiker from the cougar.
Egon yanks hard at his choker, fighting in the direction of the cat that’s three, four times his size, the cougar unbelievably big, its tail as long as Egon.
When Bellum fires a forth shot, and either misses or does no damage, Vessey unleashes Egon, commanding, “Sortez-le!”
The cougar charges Bellum, its speed at that size astounding.
Egon sprints, not toward the sprinting mountain lion but toward Bellum, Egon trained to attack gunmen.
Vessey, about to yell Gîter, heel, hesitates. Egon isn’t heading for Bellum—he’s on an interceptor line, not charging after the cougar, but where the cougar will be.
Egon barks and barks again.
With a plant of massive paws, the cougar tries to change course at a full run with a side jump. Its feet kick out from under it, skittering rocks, and it slides on its side like a derailed locomotive. The cougar is up on its broad paws in an instant. It leaps, stretching its long, limber body at Egon.
The cougar and the dog collide, Egon looking like a toy terrier. Their growls and barks are distorted and bent by the twisting. Then a roar, a howl, are each muffled by mouthfuls of fur. They both release their loose, initial bites. They circle around one another, close range. The cougar claws at Egon. Egon pulls back then lunges, is swatted toward the cougar’s flank but manages to clamp his bite on the muscled hindquarter. The cougar pulls away, dragging Egon. Again it pulls, drawing Egon on his paws over snowy bluestone. When Egon doesn’t let go, the cougar torques its body, reaching its huge head around, and clamps its mouth on top of Egon’s narrow head.
Vessey and Merced, stunned, watch the cat and dog fight. Vessey’s snapped to by Bellum’s sudden proximity to the fray.
Bellum continues her advance, hissing, waving arms at cougar and dog. She stumbles over the uneven ground, a loose slab of bluestone. She lifts the sharp slab overhead and hurls it. She grabs another slab like a long shard, closing on the cougar.
Merced finds a chunk of bluestone, throws it, hitting the cat, and Vessey rains down cold rock after rock.
Only after Egon slumps with a yelp, limp, does the cougar release the dog’s skull. The cat backs away from the collapsed dog, feints toward Bellum, who lifts her arms, splays the fingers of her empty hand, rises on tiptoes, and screams.
The cougar backs away, takes a step toward the hiker who hasn’t moved. The cougar gives its own berserker scream, and Bellum responds, even louder, lower and higher both, from the floor of her pelvis up through the bony bridge of her face, a war cry so visceral that Vessey shrinks from the sound.
The cougar pulls in its tail, raises its ears, turns its back, and bounds into the trees.
* * *
As Merced looks on, Vessey uses both hands to scoop and shove the indígena’s intestines back into her. Vessey says, “Help, Merced.”
“Como?”
“Zip her vest, while I’m here holding everything in, then her jacket.”
Merced doesn’t move.
Bang Bang strips to her tank top, starts biting at the shoulder of her jacket.
Merced says to Vessey, “Bang Bang’s eating her shirt.”
She tears off one sleeve, then begins biting the other.
Merced says, “Egon.”
“Triage,” Vessey says. “Now help. I got my hands full. Zip her the fuck up.”
Merced takes hold of both open ends of the jogging vest. Just a jogging vest. Dios mío. He fits the zipper parts together, and zips.
Bang Bang pulls plastic wrap off a couple of white plugs. They look like cotton dummy rounds. She pushes the plugs into the largest puncture wounds, then wraps one camo sleeve snuggly around the indígena’s neck. Without instruction, Vessey holds it in place while Bang Bang folds, wraps, twists the ends, and ties tight the other sleeve overtop.
Bang Bang grabs the indígena’s wrist. The beds of the indígena’s nails are blue. Bang Bang puts her ear to the indígena’s mouth. “Faint pulse, steady breathing. We’ve got to move. She’s in shock.”
Vessey picks up Merced’s carved stick, rubs the end of the antler with snow. To Bang Bang, he says that the gut wound looks godawful, but it’s not losing a ton of blood. “That’s not what’s gonna do her in, not now anyway. Infection later might finish off what that cat started.”
“Neck’s a mess,” Bang Bang says, “but the blood looks too dark to be arterial. Punctures in one or both jugulars, not the carotids. If it were carotids, she’d be already dead. We hurry, she might have a chance.”
While Vessey and Bang Bang move the indígena onto her sled, Merced goes to Egon. The dog looks asleep in snow. Merced sees a steely glint, picks up Bang Bang’s handgun, and slips it into his waist. He heaves the dog over his shoulders. When he says, “Bang Bang,” she pulls her pistol from his waistband, touches Merced’s scruffy face with her cold hand. She leans in and butts her head against Egon’s brow, pressing her head to his for a moment, then she kisses his black nose.
She and Vessey drag the indígena feetfirst, limp on her gear in the plastic sled. Bang Bang’s alpaca hide thrown over and tucked under. A sleeping Inuit, but for the blood.
Merced plods behind them with dead Egon passing gas on his shoulders. He can’t take his eyes off the indígena’s upside-down face that has lost its copper shine, gone gringa. Her long black hair sweeps the snow behind her like the dark train of a mourner’s dress on Día de los Muertos.
Vessey uses Merced’s short-timer’s stick to help him make way with his small portion of the burden. Bang Bang, her leanly muscled arms exposed to the shoulder, wears the indígena’s waist harness to pull more than her share of the weight.
Merced grips Egon’s legs, wet from snow. The black pads of the dog’s paws are soft yet rough as sandpaper. Merced presses one against his cheek. The dog’s head lolls against Merced’s shoulder, dripping blood off the point of an ear, leaving a dotted red line in the snow behind their procession. They’re a sad parade, Merced thinks, and he can’t shake the sense that this is how the end of the world begins—they’re bearing the first bad news of it.
* * *
In front of Standard Tower, Vessey takes quick charge. “We got to get her to a hospital,” he says. “Closest one’s Catskill Regional in Harris. We’ve got no way to call 911.”
Bellum says, “She might have a phone on her. Anyone go through her stuff?”
“Even if she does,” Vessey says, “you’re gonna have a hard time getting service. We make our calls at a payphone in Liberty. To drive there to stop and place a call’s stupid.”
“How far’s the hospital?”
“Ten, twelve minutes, going the speed limit.”
“I could drive her,” Bellum says, “but whoever drops her off is gonna have to talk to cops. I can’t. I’m a deserter, Vess. They’ll haul me in.”
“Okay, good to know. I’ll drive. You find Milt. Think he’s still down in the hole.”
She steps to Vessey and hugs him hard enough to squeeze a hu
nh out of him. “Thank you,” she says, still holding him.
He returns her hug. “You did good out there under duress. More than good.”
“I’m sorry, Vess.”
“Nothing to be sorry for.”
“I mean about Egon.”
“Go,” he says, and she does.
Vessey checks the woman’s pulse, weak. He gives orders the whole time he and Merced work to situate her in the back of the van: “Merced, when we’re done, I need you to ring the big bell for an emergency muster. Bellum and Milt’ll be along shortly.”
“This is it, isn’t it?”
“Roger that.”
“They’ll come for me. I’m just gonna split, Vess. I gutted that poor bonita.”
“You didn’t hurt that woman, you hear me?”
“I did, Vess. Opened her up with my stick like a wet enchilada.”
“No you didn’t, Merced. That cougar did.”
“You mean jaguar. Jaguar came after, hombre.”
“No one’s gonna know a damn bit of difference.” Vessey makes sure the woman’s head tips to the side. “And I won’t say a fucking word to anybody. Cause it’s just like us whiteys. Come in here and stir the pot. Get things all roiled. Then the brown folks wind up trying to kill each other. Same here as anywhere. And this woman, if she survives, won’t be able to make sense of what just happened. Now, dismissed.”
After Vessey drives off, Merced heads away from Masada and the big bell, toward the former golf course and the chicken coop, where Alhazred, oblivious to the apocalypse underway, mucks out shitty straw, cursing and mumbling to his pitchfork.
“Alhazred! Vess wants you to go bang the big bell. Emergency muster. Bang like there’s not tomorrow. Bang like it’s the end of el mundo.”
* * *
Ray’s taking the suicide route off Slawson Mountain. He intends to place Bellum’s alpaca hide and her earmuffs near the cook fountain in the Alpine village, but after spotting Stone, he decides to kill two birds. He hands off her things and passes on a little disinformation. Engages in a little PSYOP at Stone’s well-deserved expense.
The way Bellum left, Ray’s sure she won’t be back. He’s got their last conversation on a loop, trying to figure out where he fucked it all up. One thing she said—asking the name of the company that bought Zeitgeist—set him in action.
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