Sayed went down on his face as if he had been struck by a car. The shotgun flew out of his hands and went bouncing and rolling across the ground toward Zula.
She was so preoccupied with that one detail that she saw nothing else until she had jerked her arms free from the pack straps and flung herself forward to scrabble the weapon up out of the thick layer of old brown pine needles and leaves in which it had come to rest.
Then she stared up into the golden face of a huge feline, regarding her from perhaps six feet away. The animal had blood on its fangs. It had planted both of its feet on Sayed’s back; each of its claws was embedded in a spreading disk of blood. But most of the blood came from the back of Sayed’s neck, which had been destroyed; the animal had struck him with a flying leap, and bitten all the way through his cervical spine, in the same instant.
She remembered that she had a shotgun in her hands. She aimed it at the cougar. For her mind, belatedly switching into animal taxonomy mode, had identified this as one. The same one, no doubt, that had been skulking around the camp last night and going after the raccoons earlier. She wondered if Sayed had had the presence of mind to chamber a shell and flick the safety off. She pulled back with her right hand, saw the yellow gleam of a shotgun shell in the breech, pushed it closed. Glanced back up at the cougar. Found the safety with her thumb, glanced down to see it had been left on, flicked it up until a red dot showed. Red, you’re dead. Looked back up at the cougar. It was making no effort to come after her, but it was definitely paying close attention, snarling, making it clear she wasn’t wanted.
It was guarding its kill.
Keeping the shotgun in her right hand, aimed at the cougar, she squatted down, thrust her left arm through a pack strap, and heaved the burden up onto her back. This irritated the cougar, sending it into a little fit of squawling and posturing. But Zula was definitely backing away now, increasing the distance.
Something caught her knee. She saw with horror that it was Zakir’s bloody paw, not so much trying to hold her back as imploring her for aid. She kicked loose from him and moved away. Not until she was perhaps a hundred feet distant did she shoulder the pack properly and fasten its hip belt.
Her hearing had gone all funny during this, but when it went back to normal, she noted that Ershut or someone seemed to have gotten to the bell and stifled it. It was still making a dim pocking noise, but the bell wasn’t clanging anymore and probably couldn’t be heard from more than a few hundred yards’ distance.
This made it possible to hear two sounds that had previously been obscured by the ringing of the bell. One, behind Zula now, was Zakir screaming. Apparently he had got his voice working again. His cries had an inchoate gargling sound. The other was a motor coming down the road from the direction of Elphinstone.
Zula was pretty sure it was a Harley-Davidson.
Chet was coming. He had heard the fire bell and was coming to see what was the matter.
Zula had drawn him here by setting the fire, and now they were going to kill him.
She heard Jahandar’s voice, shouting into a walkie-talkie or a phone. As he spoke, Zula caught sight of him retreating from the dam, taking up a position behind a corner of the main Schloss buildings.
Chet wasn’t in view yet, but the headlight of his chopper was illuminating the trees along the road perhaps half a mile away, and she could hear the engine throttling up and down as he took the familiar curves.
FROM THE DAY that Chet had made the decision to settle down and bind his fortune to that of Dodge and his crazy Schloss project, not an hour had gone by without his thinking, and usually worrying, about some aspect of the building and its grounds. This was his life now. It was not a bad life. But part of the job was getting up in the middle of the night and running into the place to put out fires.
Not literally. There had never been a serious fire in the place and he doubted that there ever would be, given the capabilities of the sprinkler system that they had, at shocking expense, installed in every room of the complex. But it was useless against metaphorical fires: petty burglaries, leaky roofs, starlings in the eaves, bears and raccoons getting into the Dumpsters. Once the staff had grown to a size where he could delegate a lot of that, he had acquired the property a few miles up the road and built his own cabin on it, so that he could live close enough to the Schloss for convenience, but far enough away to get his mind off its myriad chores and troubles.
The one exception was Mud Month, when all the staff went on vacation. Nothing could be delegated then; either Chet or Dodge had to be on call 24/7 until they all came back.
Dodge was there now. Had been for a few days. This had given Chet an opportunity to relax, catch up on his reading, go on a few motorcycle rides with the surviving members of the Septentrion Paladins. He had just returned from one such ride, up the west shore of Kootenay Lake, a few hours before sunset. After grilling a steak and killing half a bottle of cabernet, he had collapsed into bed early and slept well. But in the hour before dawn he had found himself lying awake, convinced he was hearing something from up the valley: a jangling bell.
That fucking sprinkler system had sprung another leak.
It couldn’t be an actual fire. Had there been an actual fire, the alarm system would have detected it, summoned the fire department, and sent a text message to his phone. Sirens would be screaming by his cabin already. And Dodge would be calling him.
No, something must have whacked a sprinkler head and set the thing going. Right now water was spraying in torrents around one of the Schloss’s rooms. It had happened before. It was always a huge mess. It was probably Dodge, up early in the morning, chasing a stray bat around with a badminton racket, flailing in the dark, not thinking about the delicate sprinkler heads. Now he was alone in the Schloss in the wee hours, dark and wet and furious and humiliated, too proud to call for help.
Chet dragged himself out of bed, peed, and pulled his motorcycle leathers on over his pajamas. Not very dignified, but only Dodge would see him, and he had no secrets from Dodge. He strode out into the patch of gravel between his cabin and the road. The chopper was there. It was dirty and tired, needed to have its oil changed. Riding it through the dark, he would be uncomfortable and cold. A sane man would take the SUV that was parked right next to it. But Chet on a whim had decided to ride the bike. What the hell, he was up anyway and about to spend the whole day dealing with Dodge’s mess. It couldn’t get a hell of a lot more uncomfortable than that.
He bestrode the Harley, kicked it into life, fishtailed it around in the gravel, and headed out onto the little access road that led down to the highway from his property. This was a former mining road, bladed once a year after the spring thaw had finished turning it into a rutted gully. So it would never get any worse than it was today. Feeling his way into the hyperbola of light cast by the chopper’s headlamp, he put all his attention, for the first couple of minutes, into staying out of the deepest channels that had been carved into it during the weeks since the snow had begun to thaw. His slow progress was a blessing in disguise; if he went any faster, clots of semifrozen mud would hurtle up from the tires and glue themselves onto the insides of the bike’s fenders.
As he neared the bank of the river, the trees thinned out and afforded him a clear view of the eastern sky, which had gone all pink and pearly. He was tempted to shut off the headlamp and run dark, the way he had used to, back in the old days. Back before the accident. But the accident had put sense into him, if having cornstalks shoved into your brain could be so called. And living in these parts he had learned that this was the very time of day when critters were about: it was light enough that they could see what the hell they were doing, but not so light as to make it easy for predators to spot them, and so this was the hour when a lone biker was most likely to kill himself by T-boning a moose in the middle of the road. Predators would be out too, looking for crepuscular prey with their big glowing eyes and listening with their twitching radar-horn ears. The Selkirks were oversupplied with apex predators: bears of two types, wolves, coyotes, cougars and various smaller cats, just to name the four-legged ones — to the point where their station on the food pyramid no longer seemed like an apex so much as a plateau or mesa. If striking a deer on your chopper was bad, what adjective could be applied to striking a grizzly who was stalking a deer?