Behind him, Zan flicked on her cigarette lighter. By its light she caught her first good view of Scouse and his murderer. He had stopped screaming now, and was reduced to a horrible gargle, deep in his swelling throat.
Most people are afraid of snakes, perhaps because they don’t understand them. But for one person in twenty, phobia goes beyond normal fear to absolute panic and horror. Zan was the one in twenty. When she saw the twisting body of the Gaboon Viper her mouth stretched wide in a silent scream. The flickering flame of the lighter showed neck tendons strained to dark cords, and her whole body began to tremble. Her eyes bulged white against the flawless tan complexion. Without making any move to help Scouse, she dropped the cigarette lighter, turned, and ran blindly across the broad arena. At the edge of it lay a smooth wall, waist high. She scrambled over, a pale blur in the night.
I opened my mouth to shout a warning.
**Don’t help her. She deserves whatever she gets.**
The warning words stuck in my throat. Zan was out of this area and into the enclosure that held the Elapidae. She was making a mindless run straight across the rock-strewn surface.
Sixty yards would take her to the outer wall. Before her lay a terra incognita that could hold anything: spectacled cobras, a lurking hamadryad, or tiny and deadly kraits. A few drops of venom from an Australian tiger snake would kill a man or woman in a few minutes.
Zan ran on.
**It is over now, but we were close. Long before I understood Tippy’s mind, I knew her body. I never fathomed what drove her to offer agony rather than ecstasy, but I remember the treasure-house of warm secrets beneath her fashionable clothing. All that is gone, forever past recall. Weep for Tippy, the way she might have been. The way I thought she was.**
She was running on; twenty yards, then thirty. Nothing tangled her feet, nothing flashed fangs at her calves. I stooped to the sand, feeling about for the lighter that she had dropped. Scouse had staggered to lean against the rock, and slowly subsided to lie groaning facedown on the rough surface. I ignored him, reaching cautiously past the Gaboon Viper to pick up the lighter.
Ten yards more and Zan would be at the wall. As I straightened up, she was suddenly gone from view. Another moment, and she gave a scream of pure terror, a heartstopping ululation that rose higher and higher in pitch and seemed to go on forever.
All around me, the Zoo woke to the sound. I heard the answering bark and howl of desert dogs, cracking screams from the macaque monkeys, the angry roar and bellow of the big cats. My head seemed to split open with the sounds.
**I was drowning, choking on the warm blood in my throat. The helicopter was down, I had fallen away from the controls, and part of the broken rotor had skewered me neatly through the right side. I had to hold on, pass on the word…**
More sounds and sights. Colored ribbons danced around me, red and green and violet, matching their sinuous movement to the animal cries that filled the zoo. In the other enclosure, something had jerked upright and was running blindly back towards me. It collided with the waist-high wall and scrabbled at the smooth surface, while an eerie portamento wail came muffled from its throat.
I took four hesitant paces towards the wall and flicked the lighter to the maximum setting of its gas jet.
Zan was leaning against the wall. Squirming dark tendrils hung from her face and shoulders, and another dark band circled her neck. As I watched, one clinging to her cheek dropped loose and wriggled away across the sand.
She had fallen face-first into a nest of the spectacled cobra, and a dozen of the young had attacked her. The foot-long snakes, venomous from the moment of birth, had buried their fangs in her cheeks and neck. One clung fast to her lower lip. Another, entangled in her blouse, wriggled with fangs buried in her right breast. An ooze of blood and gelatinous liquid ran from a deep wound on her left eye, past a flap of torn eyelid that hung loose against her cheek.
“Zan! Pull them off — they inject more venom, the longer they bite.”
She was past hearing. After a few more seconds shuddering against the wall, she turned and ran headlong back across the open enclosure. In a few paces she was too far away to be seen with the cigarette lighter’s flame. I heard an angry hissing, another scream of horror from the darkness, and a frenzied threshing.
Then I had to think of myself. Every movement I made brought nausea and confusion. I lurched back to where Scouse lay silent on the sand. His neck had swollen until it was as wide as his head, and his face was a purple-black mask. He had asphyxiated as his windpipe was flattened in the congested throat.
**Don’t go near the snake. Get the jacket — got to get the jacket.**
Slowly, weak and shaky as a ninety-year-old, I carefully bent and picked up my rumpled coat. Dark drops of venom spattered the sleeve, but the thin box of the Belur Package still sat in the left pocket. I put the jacket on, rummaged in the sand and gravel for another thirty seconds, then wearily straightened.
I had one last barrier to surmount, and I knew in my aching bones that it would be too much for me. No matter how I tried, I would never be able to climb out of the Zoo, over that wall. And Pudd’n was somewhere in the darkness ahead. From the moment that I thrust the viper at Scouse, there had been no sound from the entrance to the enclosure, but I knew Pudd’n was there, waiting for me.
My left leg had lost all feeling. I dragged myself slowly forward on my hands and knees. My left hand was flat on the sand, my right supported me on its clenched knuckles. Each time that I allowed my head to hang down, the ground tilted and reared like a squall-hit ship.
**All the effort, two years and three continents, to end like this. Crawling, bleeding, weaker and weaker. But Scouse and Mansouri won’t get it now.**
In front of me, the gate to the enclosure; standing there like a statue in my path, Pudd’n. I came up to sit back on my haunches, fished the cigarette lighter from my left pocket, and snapped it into flame. Pudd’n blinked as the light met his eyes, but he did not move. I tried to speak, failed, cleared my throat and tried again.
“All right, Pudd’n. It’s your move now. Scouse is dead, and Xantippe won’t live more than an hour or two. Come and get it. The Belur Package is right here, in my pocket.”
He stared down at me. His big face was pale, like a wax mask, and he looked sick and haggard. He shook his head slowly, without speaking.
“Did you hear me?” I said. “I’m done for. I couldn’t fight a baby. What now, Pudd’n?”
He sighed, and a shudder shook his whole body.
“I saw it,” he said at last. “Saw what happened to Scouse an’ Zan. Christ, I could spew my ring. I’ve always been scared of snakes.”
“Well? What now? You still after the package?”
He shook his head again. “I’m done with that bleeder, it’s been all bad luck. You get out of here. I won’t stop you.”
He took a step back, outside the enclosure.
I moved my right hand forward and up, to show him Scouse’s pistol that had been hidden in my sleeve and closed fist. “You just bought your own life, Pudd’n. I won’t stop you, either. Get out of this place. Don’t go near the enclosures. Keep to the paths, and go out over the wall. Better get a move on, before I change my mind.”
He had jerked backwards at the sight of the gun. Now he nodded and moved again, turning towards the dark path behind him. As the flame of the lighter dimmed, he was gone, crunching away along the gravel.
It made little difference to me. I had fallen forward, vaguely aware of the sand against my cheek. The clear desert sky was filling with stars, bright points of green and blue and orange that swelled and burst around me. The whole heavens lit up, filling with pulsating rosy flame.