by Lynn Red
“Guh,” Cass flung one of her arms around, and it smacked the ground hard enough to alert Lex. “Hate it when I sleep like that. Arm goes all numb. Shoulder gets sore.”
She finally got to her feet, blinked her eyes tight a few times, and then stuck her thumbs in them to clear out the sleep. “What time is it? And why did you wake me up like that?”
“Past dawn, and listen.”
“Thanks. That’s very good, very specific, why—”
That’s when she heard it – a distant buzzing sound, far away but with the quiet of the desert morning, she could still make it out clearly. “What is that?”
“Four cylinder engine. Dune buggy, probably, four wheeler maybe.”
“I bet you’re fun at parties,” she said, sticking her fists into the small of her back and leaning backward until she heard an audible pop, and groaned in pleasure. “Wait,” she said, freezing still. “That’s not good.”
Lex snarled, drawing his shoulders into that tight, ready-to-leap posture she’d seen so many times. He raised his huge head, sniffed the air, and cocked it to one side. “Quiet,” he grumbled. “It’s far, but I can make something out. We knew this would happen. I’m just glad…”
Cass huddled close to the lion. “Knew it, maybe, but I hoped it wouldn’t. One of those pointless wishes that sits around in the back of your head and you know better than to wish for, but… and there I go rambling out of nerves. Can you hear anything?”
“An engine. Four cylinder,” he said, “dune buggy or—”
“Yes, good, anything new?”
He craned his neck, staring intently into the distance. “Two engines,” he said after a moment’s pause. “Though it doesn’t make sense. Why would he be after us with these things?”
“You said yourself his truck’s a piece of ripe shit,” Cass said, straining her ears to hear whatever Lex heard, but failing completely. “Maybe he thought better of charging around the desert in his only transportation? I mean, he’s not the brightest cookie in the sleeve, but even he would probably figure out that’s a bad idea.”
“Brightest…cookie?”
“Never mind,” Cass shot back. “Should we run? I really feel like we should be running right now.”
Once again, his ears tilted back on his head, almost hidden in his mane. He let out that same low, rumbling growl he always did when he was deep in thought. This time, she just let him be. If nothing else, in the past couple days, Cass had learned that sometimes listening was the best way to figure out what was going on around you. If only I learned that one about ten years ago, she thought with a dry laugh. That and about ten thousand other things.
“They’re coming closer,” Lex whispered. “I’m fast, but from the sound of those engines, running won’t do much good. And this is as hidden as we’re going to get.” The speaking had dried his throat to the point that every word he said clicked painfully. “This might be the best chance we have of… of hiding. Without a fight…”
His voice trailed off into a painful rasp before cracking completely. Cass laid her hand between his massive shoulder blades and stroked absent mindedly. Panic set in, or would have if her first reaction to panic wasn’t to go completely numb and shut down immediately. She stared in the exact same direction that Lex stared, but whatever his lion eyes saw, she could not.
“Why don’t we fight?” she asked. “I still have my whip and you have… well you’re a giant magical lion.” She nudged him with an elbow, but instead of laughing, Lex only growled low in his throat. “If it is him, then what can they do to us – or more specifically to you – fast enough to keep you from really ruining their day?”
He narrowed his eyes. “Shoot me again, for one.”
Now she heard the two separate engines. Oh God they must be getting close if I can make out two separate hums.
“Are you scared?” she asked. It wasn’t meant as any sort of insult or anything more than a question. She was genuinely curious.
“For you,” he answered. “If they kill me, they’ll—”
“Not gonna happen,” Cass said, interrupting him as the vehicles – he was right, dune buggies – crested a distant hill. “You’re not the only one doing the protecting, remember?”
She cocked a look at Lex, who turned his head to face her. Even in this form, he wasn’t much shorter than her, and didn’t have to look up very much at all.
“Why?” he asked.
“I could ask you the same thing. Truth is that I think this has always been the way things were supposed to go. It’s you and me, just us two misfits who both shouldn’t exist against the world.”
He snarled in a way that sounded like he was smiling. “I’ll take it,” his voice cracked again. “Little over the top, but I’ll take it.”
She kicked him playfully in the side, he whipped at her with his tail. “Promise me one thing,” he growled. “If worse comes to worst, you run. Steal a dune buggy, do whatever it takes. I couldn’t live with myself if—”
“Don’t say it,” Cass cut him off. “I can’t stand to hear that. But I promise. If it makes you feel better, I promise.”
The engines hummed closer. They were now close enough that Cass could clearly hear the yelping from excited passengers, and the dead whip of rubber against the parched desert. With each needlessly hard turn, the buggies skidded, the tires screamed, and both Cass and Lex clenched their jaws tight, steeling their nerves.
“Down,” Lex growled. “Now!”
When Cass hesitated, he swept her legs out from under her at the exact moment a bullet whizzed by overhead. She hit with a thud, a grunt of pain, and then rolled to her knees.
“You think that stunt was gonna work?” Lyle’s voice was thick, syrupy, and distant, but the wind carried it to her ears clearly enough. “Make me look like an idiot, then just run away with that goddamn lion?”
“Did he see you?” she hissed at Lex, who shrugged as best a lion can shrug.
“Stay down!” he snapped, but she ignored him.
“I’m alone!” she shouted with her hands cupped around her mouth. “I’ll go with you, I don’t care. Lex got caught in mesquites, I couldn’t get him out. I may as well die in the circus dancing for your warty ass!”
She looked down at the lion and shrugged. “Figure I may as well try to make him as mad as possible at the same time I give us the element of lion surprise.”
“He hasn’t shot back yet, that’s a good thing.”
“Did you hear me?” she shouted back down to the dune buggies. They weren’t more than a hundred away then. “He’s dead! My only friend in the world is dead! Come get me! Why would I care? I don’t have anything to live for!”
“Speaking of over the top,” Lex grumbled. One of his slightly unsettling deep-chested chuckles came next. “If anyone would fall for that, it’s either Lyle or the Oscar award panel.”
She fought to keep from laughing, and managed to escape with only a grin.
“Come get me, you shit!” Immediately after delivering her last zinger, Cass hit the deck, and not a moment too soon, as another bullet whizzed overhead. This one was so inaccurate, though, that it must’ve been a warning shot. She decided to play along.
“I haven’t eaten in three days, barely had any water, I’m passing out! Quit shooting!”
The buzzing engines and squealing tires began to sound more and more separated by distance. At first they were only a monotone buzz on the horizon, but Cass soon realized as they moved into stereo that they were trying to flank her.
“Oh! Sorry!” she said, before immediately and unceremoniously throwing her bedding from the night before on top of Lex, sure to cover him enough that they wouldn’t notice until it was damn well too late for their noticing to matter. “I’ll make up the indignity later.”
“You owe me, you idiot girl!” Lyle squealed like the warthog he was. In the back of his throat was the sound of hurt, possibly betrayal? Only that slimeball could take my running away as betrayal, Cass thought wi
th a bitter smile. This is gonna be so, so worth it.
She raised her hands over her head, and made a big show of dropping the small sheathe-style knife from her left hand, and her very old, very expensive, and incredibly durable bullwhip from the right.
“Just me here, Lyle! Unarmed!”
Cass spun in a circle, watching the buggy with Lyle in the passenger seat. There were two of them, as she knew, four men to each. “Two guns,” she threw her voice like she did in the show when giving Lex a command. Her lips didn’t move, but the message reached his sensitive ears. “No, three. Two in Lyle’s buggy, one in the other.”
She kept turning to keep her eyes on Lyle, who was so covered in sweat that he had started glistening in the early morning sun, like a dew-covered egg. “You hot, Lyle? Sweatin’ a lot!”
If there was one thing Cass had learned from her time with Lyle it’s that when he was really angry, he made really bad decisions, and made them quick. The more pissed she could get him, the hastier and stupider he’d be. And when you’re talking about walking into an ambush with an eight hundred pound lion, hasty is the last thing you want to be.
The scumbag was close enough then that she could see him squeezing his meaty hands together, and sucking his bottom lip into his mouth, letting his teeth rasp over the perpetual four-day beard growth he seemed to wear. “Why ain’t you runnin’?”
Thinking back to the last encounter she’d had with him, the one where Lyle’s hot, fermented breath slid over her neck as he told her about his desire for her, she winced slightly, drawing her nose up. “Told you, I’m tired. I’m hungry, thirsty, and sick. I don’t have anything left, Lyle, I don’t care what happens to me. I’ll go back to you,” she gritted her teeth. “If it’ll make you happy, I’ll be your…” she swallowed, fighting back the taste of bile rising in her throat. “I’ll be your whore if it’ll make you happy.”
That got the rest of Lyle’s dingy, mucky, coverall-clad goons laughing and back slapping.
Just the thought got her stomach turning, wrenching back and forth. But, Cass knew it was all a game. She wasn’t going with him – not alive anyway – and the more excited she got him, the more likely he was to do something stupid.
“I’ll even act like I like it!”
More back slapping and guffaws from the idiot gallery. She kept turning, watching, waiting. With every passing second, they were getting closer and closer. Cass was starting to taste the oil-heavy exhaust, that same thick, soaking scent of oil and grit that she’d only ever encountered at a small-town Greyhound station before.
That was the place where Max, she thought, then clenched her teeth to fight back against the memory. Now isn’t the time. Hell, I don’t know if there ever is a time. She nudged the handle of her whip a few degrees to the left with her toe, still watching, waiting. Lex growled beside her.
“Close,” she threw her voice. “Real close.”
He growled again.
“I’ll say when.”
Another growl came. Just the rumbling from the lump of clothes and bag by her feet gave Cass a sense of security. Him being there, just being alive, and with her, that was all she needed. Max never made her feel like this, being home never had, nor did making a bunch of good grades, or pats on the head from teachers.
I feel alive, Cass thought as she turned and watched the dune buggies close in. She could see the bloodshot whites of Lyle’s eyes, small underneath the heavy folds of his eyelids. As stupid as it is, I feel alive for the first time in my life. And it isn’t just adrenaline, it’s—
She nudged the lump of fabric beside her. “When I hit you two more times, go time, got it?”
I’m really, really glad I thought ventriloquism was actually funny at one point in my life. “Are you gonna stay on those things? You’re not gonna try to run me over or something are you? That’s not a very good way to keep your girlfriend happy.”
She pouted a little and shook her bony hips. The bile came back when she did, but the looks of sheer delight on the faces of Lyle’s cronies, along with how they immediately started chiding him again gave her the idea that maybe this was exactly the right course of action.
“Come on, Lyle,” she whined. “Give up trying to scare me. I’m tired, I’m hungry, don’t make me beg you.”
That sparked a light in his piggy eyes. “Naw,” he said with a grin that made his cheeks puff out even bigger than they usually were. “I’ll stop when you do beg.”
With an involuntary roll of her eyes, Cass dropped her hands to her sides. “Are you serious?”
Lyle’s sweating was reaching critical mass. “I’ll just run you over otherwise,” he was practically drooling at the prospect of taking Cass for his own personal… what – trophy? Her skin crept with goosebumps.
“Oh, good God,” she sighed. “Okay fine.”
He couldn’t make this any easier.
Dramatically she went to one knee, and put her hand on the butt of her whip, which Lyle apparently hadn’t noticed. As she slowly dropped the other, she gave Lex two quick taps.
The eruption of fangs, claws, fur and roaring would have put Mt. Vesuvius to shame – that is, if it had more fur or fangs, or much of anything except lava. Although the shriek that burst out of Lyle’s mouth, was worth every second of the revulsion Cass’d felt at the notion of letting Lyle get his clammy, grimy, buttery hands all over her.
Lion paws flipped the trailing dune buggy over like it was a lightweight picnic table. As the dumbfounded guys who obviously thought they were about to go home and get a nice bowl of gruel and a bottle of hooch panicked and tried to scrabble out from underneath the cart, Lex shoulder-butted the other one, knocking it to a side, and spilling out the human contents into a pile.
One of the grunts from the overturned car managed to wedge a very old pump-action shotgun free from the wreckage, and attempted to cock it. Lex turned his attention on the dirt-covered man with the chest-length beard and narrowed his eyes, emitting a low, dangerously quiet rumble.
“Uh… uh… sorry!” the guy stammered. He was still trying to cock the gun, but his hands shook so badly that he fumbled it once, dropping the shell he was trying to load. Lex hit that poor bastard like a pumpkin out of a potato gun. To his credit, he hadn’t actually cut anyone yet, just tossed them around.
“Sorry!” he cried again as he hit the ground, back first. The wind rushed out of his chest, Lex gave one of his snort laughs, and stepped right on the man’s stomach as he squared up for whoever was stupid enough to try their luck.
As it turned out, to no one’s surprise, there was absolutely no lack of stupid in this group.
One of them – a scrawny guy with a patchy beard, decided for some reason to try and punch a goddamn lion – which worked about as well as Cass figured it would when she saw him wheel back. Lex swatted him square in the side with his huge paw, sending King Idiot of Moron Mountain careening sideways into a bramble.
In a blur of fur, Lex wheeled around, thumped heavily into the single man in the entire crowd who had managed to properly load a gun. A gnash of teeth and one paw swipe later, he went one way and the gun went the other.
“Get him, you jerkoffs! He’s just a cat!” Lyle scrambled backwards from the heap of humanity, making sure to get on the other side of his low-wage workers. In case Lex decided to go after him, he’d have to go through the other guys first.
“Just like you Lyle,” Cass said with a smile. “Scare them, keep ‘em broke, and then hide behind them when a lion’s after you.”
A sound that was roughly equivalent to the sloppy, burping noise that happens when your back sticks in the bathtub came out of Lyle’s mouth. Cass looked at him, disgusted, shaking her head.
Two more of Lyle’s men decided to try and play hero – one dove at Lex and was quickly batted aside into an unconscious lump, but the other exhibited at least enough intelligence to grab a gun – the loaded one – and stay far enough back to actually use it.
At least that’s what he tho
ught.
Cass closed her hand around the whip, popped it forward right in his face, and flustered him so badly that he dropped not only the shotgun, but also himself, all the way to the ground. Lex leapt, pinning his shoulders to the desert.
The last two shared a glance with one another, then looked over at the goon tangled up in the bramble. Lex narrowed his eyes at one of them, tensing his shoulders. Cass started turning her whip in a theatrical helicopter pattern like she did in her show. She noticed one of them glance at the dropped shotgun.
“Don’t even try it,” she snapped the whip for emphasis. “Really, don’t try it. I’ve been doing this for years. See that guy – I think his name is Toby. Or Tony?” she shrugged. “Look at his face.”
She tilted her head to the unconscious man with the angry-looking slash running straight across his bald forehead. “Think I can’t do that again? There you go, good boy,” she said, stone-voiced and cold, as he took two steps back.
“Yeah, good start. Now kick it over here,” she said, raising an eyebrow.
The worn wood of the shotgun’s stock skidded over the cracked ground, and went to rest near Lex.
If it’s safe anywhere, Cass thought, not bothering to hide the chuckle.
The sound of a spring and of air escaping a canister, immediately broke all of her good feelings. Lex roared, rearing back in pain, and then came back down with his paws kicking up a cloud of dust on either side of the pinned man’s head. Lyle was reloading, Lex was tight, flexed, and about to pounce, and when Cass shot a glance at the man she just scared off the shotgun, he was still standing there with his hands stuck in the air.
“What do you think that’s going to accomplish?” Cass sneered, taking a step toward her lion.
“Nothin’ much, but if you take one more step I’m putting this one in your neck,” he burbled. “It takes three of them to really knock him out, and he weighs, what? Eight times what you do?”
Cass laughed. “If only.”
She took one more step, challenging Lyle. He only smiled, fired a second dart into Lex’s neck and quickly put in another.
“How you gonna get to a doctor?” he scrambled to his feet, licking his lips. “I shoot you, you’re dead. That damn lion won’t make it either.” With the dart gun still pointed directly at Cass, Lyle tilted his head in Lex’s direction, shaking it slightly.