The Fear in Yesterday's Rings

by George C. Chesbro

  “I wish I had agreed to sell you the circus, Frederickson,” he said evenly.

  I reached out and scratched Mabel’s head. “You and me both, Luther. If you had, Nate Button would still be alive.”

  “As would my father. Being crushed under the feet of an elephant is not a pleasant way to die.”

  “If you and your father hadn’t decided to field-test your assassination weapon on humans, a number of people would still be alive. Being torn apart by one of these fellows you people brought back from extinction can’t be any picnic either.”

  The animal trainer nodded slightly. “We stayed too long. I had argued for some time that the animal had been sufficiently tested. My father wanted more.”

  “You’re not only a murderer, Luther, but you’re full of shit. Are you going to blame it on your father? For Christ’s sake, how many people had to die before you’d proved to yourself that a lobox was a viable assassination weapon? I think you were just getting off on it, Luther. You were so proud of yourself that you just wanted to keep on playing with the toy you’d created. It must have given you an enormous sense of power. Maybe you were even amused by all the werewolf stories; you liked reading about your pets in the newspapers.”

  It was probably at least partially true, and he didn’t like me saying it. “There were problems, Frederickson. You don’t know the whole story. You don’t understand.”

  “Poor you.”

  “You’ve jeopardized years of work and millions of dollars.”

  “Jeopardized? I’ll be damn sorry if I haven’t wiped it out—but I think that’s what’s happened. I’m curious as to why you’re so short-handed, Luther. Last night, back at the circus, you certainly had plenty of hired help. Or was it loaned? Those men were provided to you by the same people, government or private industry, who helped you set up in this country, weren’t they? Where are they now? And what the hell are you doing traipsing all over the countryside in a truck that size?”

  Luther glanced at the lobox, then back at the truck. “I have everything I need,” he said in a somewhat cryptic tone that was barely audible.

  So he was alone, I thought. On his own. I pondered what could have happened, then thought I had come up with the answer. “It was my last performance that did it. Right, Luther? That, and the death of your father. There was no way the local and state authorities could fail to hear about that; there were too many citizens. The cops’ phones must have been ringing off the hooks. The people sponsoring you knew there were going to be too many questions, too much heat. They knew the game was up, and they closed you down, didn’t they? They didn’t care about you, or the lobox, or anything else except making sure they covered their tracks. They expected you to leave the country with all the rest of the performers, but you obviously had your own notions. You thought that if you could get this missing lobox, and kill the three of us, then everything might still work out. It won’t. You’ve lost your sponsors, Luther, and at the moment I’ll bet they’re a hell of a lot more worried about you being a loose cannon than they are about me. You’re lucky you’re still alive.”

  “You’re not exactly in a position to gloat, Frederickson.”

  “I’m not gloating,” I replied, noting that he had virtually confirmed my speculation. “I’m just telling you the facts of life, as interpreted by me. I’m stating the obvious. So, why did you bring the semi? Couldn’t you find anything smaller?”

  He didn’t answer—and then I knew. I felt a chill, and I swallowed hard. My mouth had suddenly gone dry. “You’ve got the entire lobox breeding stock in there, haven’t you? Christ, you still think there’s a chance you can get them all back to Switzerland, keep breeding them, start selling them.”

  “I believe you’re sitting on my property.”

  “What a startling change of subject, Luther. Why don’t you come up here and join me, and we’ll talk about it.”

  It had been the wrong thing to say. He abruptly snapped the Smith & Wesson’s bolt into place, put his finger on the trigger. “I won’t challenge Mabel’s loyalty to you, Frederickson. You know how I feel about animals, but I am prepared to kill her if you try to get her to move against me.”

  “I have no doubt of it. Relax, Luther. As you can see, Mabel and I are just kind of hanging out here, waiting for somebody to come around so I could surrender. However, now that the situation becomes clearer, I’m thinking that maybe you should surrender to me.”

  “Don’t be absurd, Frederickson. Why are you still here?”

  “I just told you. That fanged fiend over there makes it imperative that I stay where I am, and it’s tough being on the run when you have to run around on an elephant. You should try it.”

  “Where are your brother and your girlfriend?”

  “Garth and Harper? Oh, they split.”

  “Split?”

  “They left. Vamoose. Adiós. Who wants to hang around this dreary place? Besides, they don’t like elephants as much as I do.”

  “I don’t believe they’d leave you.”

  “They didn’t leave me, Luther; they went for help. As soon as we figured out just how single-minded a lobox is—in this case, single-minded about getting me—they split. Hell, there was no sense in all of us waiting around here for you or your people to come and get us. By now, they’re probably sitting comfortably in some state police office telling their story.”

  “I don’t think I believe you,” Luther said after a long pause.

  “You believe what you want, pal. The fact of the matter is that there are only us chickens here now, but that won’t be the case for very long. Help is on the way—help for me, that is. Authorities your people don’t control will know the story by now. Killing me won’t do you any good, unless it will make you feel better. The best deal you can make is to put that lobox down there in the truck and then turn your guns over to me. You’re a potential embarrassment to some very powerful people in this country, and you’re probably in a hell of a lot of trouble for detouring from your established escape route. I know people who can guarantee your safety. You’ll go to prison, sure, but prison is better than dead. You can spend your time trying to tame some of our wilder inmates.”

  Luther wasn’t amused. He stared at me. He continued to stare for some time, then abruptly spun around and walked quickly back to the truck. He went to the right side of the semi, where there were three sets of double doors. He opened the middle doors and quickly stepped back. Two loboxes—females that were smaller than the males by almost a half, grayer in color, and lacking the distinctive black markings on their backs—jumped from the track to the ground and streaked toward the open doors behind Mabel and me. They disappeared inside the first silo without so much as a glance at the male lobox, or me.

  “Your brother and the woman don’t appear to have gotten as far as you thought,” Luther said as he walked back toward Mabel and looked up at me. His glacial blue eyes glinted in the bright sunlight.

  There was no sound from inside the silo, and I imagined the two loboxes crouched somewhere in the semidarkness, lying in wait for their prey.

  “Tough luck, Luther,” I said, glancing behind me toward the silo, then looking back at Luther. “Garth and Harper were in there; we all were. But they took off out a door at the back of the third silo while I sat out here to make sure this lobox remained preoccupied with me. Those two females are on an old scent.”

  “We’ll see,” Luther said. His voice was even, but he looked slightly uncertain.

  “Why are you running females now, Luther?” I asked, watching him carefully. “And they look to be pretty puny females at that—maybe lobox-wolf hybrids. Considering all the years you and your father have spent breeding these things, I’d have thought you had a sufficient supply of males, but I guess not. Reverse breeding with a wolf and a kuvasz to get a lobox must be even more difficult than I thought. It looks to me like you’re running low on stock.”

  Luther said nothing, but the muscles in his jaw and face tightened revea
lingly. I wondered just how many loboxes were in the track, and why he would run females after Garth and Harper now. Harper had killed one male …

  I wondered if the lobox crouching on the ground could be the only adult male Luther had left.

  Finally, Luther said, “If your brother and the woman are in the silo, and I believe they are, the females will be sufficient to find and kill them.”

  Not unless Luther had trained them to climb vertical steel ladders. “I told you they’re gone, and the authorities are probably on their way here now. Maybe that’s your good fortune, considering the other people who may be after you. After you’ve thought about it a while longer, you’ll see that it’s in your best interests to surrender to me. In the meantime, let’s talk about that whole story you said I didn’t know. Maybe it will explain why you stuck around so long, and why so many innocent people had to die. There’s something wrong with the lobox breeding program, isn’t there? Tell me how you and your father failed—”

  “My father didn’t fail!” Luther snapped, and his blue eyes glinted with anger. “The flaw was within the species, not with my father! The same thing happened to the lobox as is happening now with the cheetah! Their gene pool became too limited! The DNA of each lobox is virtually the same! You have birth defects! They are largely …”

  His voice trailed off, but I finished for him. “Sterile,” I said. “Maybe that’s why they became extinct.”

  “The problem can be corrected, with enough time. I must produce more hybrids in order to—”

  “It’s over, Luther. You’ve run out of time. Garth and Harper are gone, and the story is out. Even if you do kill me, you’ll never make it out of the country. Although it may not look like it at the moment, I’m in a position to help you. Let’s talk about how we can get you and your stock to people who will protect you. How about it?”

  Luther took the Magnum from his holster. “Get down, Frederickson.”

  I glanced over at the lobox. “Thanks, but I’d prefer to stay where I am.”

  Luther raised the Magnum and pointed it at me. “I think you’d better come down anyway. I don’t believe your brother and Miss Rhys-Whitney left you. They’re somewhere in the silos, and the loboxes will eventually get to them. Nobody is coming to help you, but my sponsors will again agree to help me when they find out I still have the means to develop what they’re looking for.”

  “If I come down, your pet will tear me apart.”

  “If you don’t come down, I will shoot you.”

  “I wonder. It seems important for you to keep up appearances. If you wanted to shoot me, I’d be on the ground right now with a bullet in my head. You’d like the police to keep speculating about ‘werewolf killings,’ and if I’m found with a bullet in me, people may start to wonder why a werewolf would carry a Magnum. If that’s what you’ve got in mind, forget it. It’s all unraveled, Luther, and there’s no way you’re going to weave it together again. If you’re going to shoot me, shoot me; neatness just doesn’t count anymore.”

  Luther reholstered the Magnum, gripped the Smith & Wesson with both hands, swung the barrel around. “I would hate to kill Mabel, Frederickson, but I certainly will if that’s what it takes to get you down on the ground. You’ll have to decide whether it’s worth sacrificing this magnificent animal’s life just so that you may enjoy, at most, a few more seconds of your own.”

  Crunch time.

  Luther, of course, had no way of knowing what had been going on between his last, presumably virile male lobox and me—but then, I had no way of knowing if the lobox’s previous submission to me was going to make any difference now that his master, with his Magnum, was back in the picture. Now seemed as good a time as any to find out just what the creature would do.

  I reached behind me for the nunchaku sticks lying on Mabel’s back, draped them by their chain around my neck, abruptly stood up. Luther said nothing about them; if he knew what nunchaku sticks were, he obviously didn’t consider them a threat. Considering his perception of the situation, which might very well be the correct one, I couldn’t fault him.

  Mabel, sensing that I wanted to get off, obediently curled her trunk upward. I stepped into the cradle of muscle and leathery hide, and Mabel slowly lowered me to the ground. I stepped off the trunk, then slowly turned and positioned myself so that Luther was on my left and the lobox on the right; man and beast were about twenty yards away from me, in opposite directions.

  It wasn’t taking Luther long to catch on to the fact that something was wrong, for he was staring with intense curiosity at the lobox, which had raised its head but had not gotten to its feet. It was certainly not the reaction the animal trainer had expected.

  Luther bent down and laid the Smith & Wesson on the ground—very slowly, obviously wary, keeping his eyes on the lobox. Then he straightened up, drew the Magnum from his holster, cocked it. The sound of the hammer clicking back seemed to me almost as loud as a gunshot.

  “Kill!” he commanded.

  Now the lobox sprang to its feet and stood stiff-legged, its hide quivering. But its ruff did not expand, and it did not move. It looked at me, lowered its head, and began to shake. This was one conflicted lobox.

  I took the nunchaku sticks from around my neck, clicked them together.

  Luther went pale, and his jaw dropped open slightly. He stared for a few moments at the reluctant lobox, then pulled the trigger of his gun, firing a bullet into the ground. Dirt kicked up at his feet, and the sound of the gunshot echoed in the surrounding forest of grain silos.

  “Kill, damn you! Kill!”

  The lobox’s reaction was to spin around and race full bore around behind the silo.

  There wasn’t any moss growing on that lobox, I thought. In attempting to resolve its dilemma of choosing between dying from a bullet—and I no longer doubted that it could conceive of its own death—and killing, or at least attacking, its new “leader,” the lobox had opted to simply depart the premises, at least for a while. I considered it an excellent choice, and I wished I could join it. Since I couldn’t, I instead took advantage of Luther’s momentary distraction to dart around behind the formidable shield of Mabel’s left front leg. I doubted he was ready yet to kill Mabel; he would do that only as a last resort, or if she attacked him. First, I hoped, he would try to angle around to try to get a clear shot at me.

  If he did that, and if he wandered too close to the silo, I would have the opportunity of seeing how much moss was growing on Garth.

  However, Luther didn’t seem to be in any hurry—for the moment, at least—to flush me out. He still seemed stunned by the lobox’s behavior. For almost a minute he simply stood and stared at the corner of the silo where the creature had disappeared. Then he slowly turned toward where I was peering out from behind Mabel’s leg.

  “This is somehow your doing, Frederickson,” he said in a low, tense voice, his Swiss-German accent suddenly more pronounced, giving his tone a guttural sound. “I can’t conceive of how you managed it. You are a most remarkable man.”

  What I did next was dangerous, but I considered it worth the risk. Discovering that Luther had brought along two fresh loboxes primed for Garth and Harper had been a nasty surprise, but the unpleasantness had been tempered considerably by the fact that they had, of course, immediately run into a cul-de-sac in pursuit of their prey. I wanted to make sure they stayed put, and I took advantage of Luther’s continuing dyspepsia and distraction to back up, and then move quickly over the five yards or so to the silo. I closed the double doors, secured them with the chain I had left hanging on one of the inside pegs, then scurried back behind my elephant barricade.

  Luther hadn’t moved. He didn’t appear to have even noticed that I had temporarily exposed myself to his gun—or he didn’t care.

  “Flattery will get you nowhere, Luther. Are you ready to surrender?”

  “How did you do it, Frederickson? How is it possible?”

  “Throw your guns over here and back away, and I’ll tell yo
u all about it. Obviously, I know things about loboxes you don’t. Give it up.”

  “I can’t, Frederickson,” he said in an odd—almost plaintive—tone of voice. “I couldn’t … survive in prison. I’m only happy when I’m with animals. To spend the rest of my life caged like a beast myself … no. I would much prefer to die.”

  I believed him, but it didn’t answer the question of why he hadn’t yet made any attempt to move on me. I was resigned to the fact that he would eventually shoot Mabel, thinking that would be the end of it for me too; but if he did, he would soon find out just how formidable an obstacle the corpse of an African elephant can be. He was going to have to stalk a dwarf over and around a mountain of tons of dead flesh. I had no doubt that I was quicker than he was; if he made just one mistake, and he would, he was going to find out how quick I was and how deadly a pair of nunchaku sticks can be.

  “Hey, Luther,” I said quietly. “Was I right before, about most of the loboxes being sterile? Is that lobox that ran off the last male you have?”

  At first I didn’t think he was going to respond. Then, after some time, he slowly nodded. “The only one that is so close to a full-blooded lobox—the actual, separate breed. It would take many breeding generations to produce another like him.”

  “Too bad. I guess that one animal is even more valuable than I thought.”

  Luther apparently didn’t feel like chatting any longer, for he abruptly wheeled around and stalked back to the semi. I didn’t like the feel of the the situation, and I liked it even less when he stopped next to the tractor-trailer, yanked a second set of double doors open, and quickly stepped back.

  Even before the grayish-brown shape shot from the opening, hit the ground, and came sprinting toward me, I guessed why Luther had been in no hurry to play hide-and-seek with me between and around Mabel’s massive legs. He’d hedged his bets with me, as well as with Garth and Harper, and before setting out had primed another lobox to kill me.

  The small female was covering the ground between us in great bounds, and I had only milliseconds to make a decision: try to keep dodging around behind Mabel’s leg, where freedom to swing my nunchakus was severely limited and I could only poke at it, or move away and try to kill it with a lucky hit before it opened my arteries with its teeth or claws.