Tour of Duty: Stories and Provocation (32 page)

“Oh, calm down, Peter,” it said in a guttural rasp. “I’m the hunter this day, but you are not my prey.”

“D-did I know you in life?” I almost squeaked, accepting a talking leopard but fearing no less my future as hamburger.

“You wrote of me,” he said as he padded easily into the clearing and across the fire from me. I had a grass hut behind me that wouldn’t slow him for more than a second, and in the tall scrub I’d have no chance whatsoever. He was seven feet if an inch, rippling, muscular; the feline equivalent of a wrestler. His coat had dappled spots that would make a Hollywood star debate between skinning him for a bedspread or filming a documentary.

“You’re the Rudyaprayag Leopard?” I asked.

“Well and truly,” he said, and half bowed, stretching his forelegs forward, paw by paw. “You may call me ‘Rudy.’”

Rudy had killed about three hundred people in India whilst alive. Documented. How many more, undocumented, was unknown. Colonel Corbett had ended Rudy’s reign with a lucky shot, after an entire regiment had failed. I also knew this cat could disable traps and open doors.

I thought,
Look, if the beggar rips you to shreds, you die, the Undertaker revives you, and there’s a slim chance of ending up somewhere more palatable, like Hellaska. Or even Hellwai’i, while we’re dreaming. . . .

Rudy seemed rather relaxed, though, and said, “If you aren’t going to have the liver, might I have a nip? My tummy is aquiver.”

“Go ahead,” I consented. Before me sat a poetic leopard, though not up to the standards of Rudy Kipling.

The liver disappeared as fast as a credit rating, and he sat back licking his chops.

“Thank you,” he said. “Let us depart this base and on with the chase.”

“What’s your pleasure this morning, Rudy?” I asked.

“Lion. The Nemean Lion, to be precise.”

I thought back to the mythology I’d read in high school, far back in New Jersey. “Isn’t that a North African or Middle Eastern beast?”

“And where are we?”

Then I realized that the camp today was in low scrub, and drier. They’d relocated me again, to the Searingeti. That explained the heat shooting up. I could already see mirage waves in the distance. Yes, this was lion country.

Sighing at my hangover, lack of attention and general bad mood, I flicked a wave:
after you.
Might as well have the heat behind us.

The leopard padded ahead, shifting muscle under a fine hide. I’d helped quite a few clients convert leopards to rugs, and always respected the beasts. I wasn’t sure of his odds against a lion, though—particularly not a mythic one of heroic stature. Leopards are more energetic and cagey, certainly more intelligent and flexible; but lions have more mass and more hide. I’d consider shooting a leopard with the 7.5X54mm cartridges I had. If I shot a lion with them, and the lion noticed, the result would not be pleasant.

“Why
this
lion?” I asked, still feeling odd, conversing with a cat. Or walking along a rutted trail with one, winding between short, scrubby trees and armpit-clumps of grass.

“Why not?” he rumbled back in a purring chortle.

I’d have questioned his sanity—except he was a talking leopard, we were in hell, and I knew in life he’d taken down buffalo. On the other hand, the lion had the same weaponry he did, only more so.

Some hellish principle prevents me asking my clients if they realize they’re doomed to die. I’m blocked, for whatever reason.

“Short break,” I said after an hour.

“If you wish,” he replied, unruffled so far.

I had water and it was clean enough, for a wonder. I drank sparingly. Rudy stared at me and I got the hint, but there was no bowl for him to lap from.

“Can I pour you some?” I offered.

“You are gracious, for my thirst is hellacious.”

“Isn’t everything?” I replied.

He bent his head far back, and I poured several gurgles into his open jaw, staring at fangs that were larger than bucksaw teeth.

On we trudged, the ground turning to rolling hummocks and thicker grass. Lion country, as if there’d been any doubt.

“You know of this beast, from far to your east?” Rudy asked.

“Heracles killed him, didn’t he?”

“Without sword or spear, for his skin won’t tear.”

Oh, Christ on a crutch in a tutu. Now I recalled. No mortal weapon could touch the Nemean lion. Rudy was on his own, because I certainly couldn’t choke any lion to death.

Rudy said, “He is ahead; I smell him.” He didn’t try a rhyming couplet that time, which made me wonder if it were an act.

The Nemean lion appeared over a rill. It was a gorgeous beast, fur of what seemed pure gold, proud of stature, with a long, thick neck better befitting a jaguar. His mane shimmered, and he was easily twice Rudy’s size.

My client wasted no time, slinking into a low sprint that any Army Ranger would trade a testicle to learn. He must have taken lessons from James Brown, the way his paws floated across the landscape. He approached in a long, darting curve, sinuous and fluid; slowing behind cover, then streaking between.

The Nemean stood taller, then splayed and coiled and sprang. He wound up a good twenty feet in the air, as Rudy emerged from a tuft of grass. That lion dropped like a mix of skydiver and pro wrestler, casting a broad shadow of foreboding.

Rudy leapt up, snapped his jaws around the lion’s throat, and made that twist leopards use to snap the neck. On a lesser creature, that would have been it. On a lion, even with a neck that long, all it did was set Rudy swinging like a baboon until they crashed together into the ground. He tried to sink rear claws for a gut and front claws to sever tendons, but the Nemean batted them aside and roared like a B52.

The preferred follow-up of the leopard is to close jaws over the muzzle and suffocate the prey. Hardly. If he let go of the lion, he’d be pâté. They rolled around snarling and grunting, trying to eviscerate each other with rear claws. Rudy’s were sharper. The lion’s were larger and stronger. Ribbons of blood turned into Picasso-esque splashes, the two felines melting across the rocks then rising into the air.

All I could do was watch, and be grateful I’d not met this end in life, given the many chances I’d had.

Rudy was slowly choking the undeath out of the lion, but his grip was not great and the thing’s neck was so huge he couldn’t open wide enough: Rudy would have to be able to dislocate his jaw like a rattlesnake for that.

The Nemean meantime was crushing the leopard under his greater mass, batting him with plate-sized paws, and trying for his own bite with jaws that could easily span Rudy’s neck.

The sound was nightmarish, reminiscent of chainsaws and chalkboards. I wondered if we were in India, because I could swear I saw eight limbs on each, ripping and tearing. The lion was not impervious to leopard claws: there were rips in that flawless, legendary hide. Rudy, though, was clearly the undercat. They fell apart for a moment, heaving for breath, and I tried to judge their state.

The lion had an injured paw and several tears. Rudy had a damaged shoulder and a huge flap peeled off his right haunch.

Then they were at it again, shrieking and shredding; fangs locked in an obscene kiss as each tried to tear the other’s jaw. They circled and slowed and fell, then squirmed and thrashed. Even if I didn’t know how it was supposed to end, I could tell Rudy was taking his number for the Undertaker.

I’d never shot at a client before, and I wondered what hellish rules there were for mercy. I’d never liked wounded animals; it was my duty as a professional to put them down. And the lion was in sad shape, too.

Then I remembered that mortal weapons wouldn’t work on that magnificent creature.

But those had been ancient weapons: spears and swords and arrows. Heracles had clubbed the thing. I thought perhaps a bullet would act as a club, not penetrating, but applying 2700 foot-pounds as blunt trauma.

I raised the little MAS, fired, and caught the lion near the spine. Lucky shot. He staggered from the blow. I cycled that odd backward bolt, fired again, and grazed his neck. The third round punched through Rudy’s shoulder and he snarled a keen of pain. The fourth caught the bullseye—or lion’s eye. He recoiled and writhed and left my client alone for a moment. Protecting my client is my duty.

Then the lion rolled and rolled back, trying to get Rudy in a hug between us. I figured I had nothing to lose and fired the last shot.

I missed. That is, I’d aimed for the head, but hit his shoulder. However, I hit where Rudy had ripped open a chunk of skin and, without his magic hide, the bullet did what it was supposed to, smashing bone and chewing down into his thorax. He gurgled a roar with bloody, frothing bubbles and arched back in agony, then collapsed.

The lion breathed twice more in deep, laboring heaves, then went limp.

Rudy shimmied and clawed from under the corpse of his trophy, little good would it do him: His ribs were cracked, one eye swollen closed, a fang snapped off and bleeding, and his skin hung in tatters with loops of gut protruding. Part of me wished I had a round for him, if that was allowed, or if I morally could nerve myself to use one on him.

In a raspy, gasping growl he asked, “Do you know why I wraithed the night, to leave the locals in fright?”

I had to think on it, to decide that was all one question.

“No,” I said, panting for breath and nervously caressing the trigger of the empty rifle.

“Four hundred and seventeen. I counted. Four hundred and seventeen humans, aged from three to eighty. The numbers are quite weighty. Cows and chickens and goats. Not once did I chance on a tiger, of stripy and orange coat.”

I understood. He was so good no earthly beast he’d met had been a challenge. He’d pick school kids out of the line walking home, unseen. He left many of his kills uneaten. He’d killed for sheer pleasure, an almost human trait, and he suffered a human penalty, damnation, for his sins. Here, he’d hoped to find a fight.

His breath was fainter already. I suspected internal bleeding.

“Was it worth it?” I asked.

“That answer you know. For now, I must go.”

He sighed and rolled over.

I did know. All of us who hunt feel that frisson of danger, the pushing of boundaries. We stand on the edge and dare the wind to throw us over.

Perhaps in hell itself, Rudy had found what he’d sought in life. Was his torment to endlessly stalk the most nightmarish of prey?

With the light of Paradise masquerading as the sun, staring from beneath an eyelid of clouds to taunt me, I turned to hike the miles back to a hut and dine on a dry rope of biltong.

I felt worse than usual on waking, having been up late, pondering. My shoulders felt as if some kinbaku practitioner had used them on a human sculpture. Of course, I had no woman bound in knots, and no aspirin for surcease. I tried to stretch and press, and rose from the taut canvas cot. I glanced around and took in the angle of light. Then I stopped and forgot how much pain I was in.

There was a bloody huge rifle leaning against one pole of the hut.

I wasn’t sure of the brand, but that was most certainly some semiautomatic .50 BMG, a pocket cannon, if you have pockets that start at your shoulders and reach the ground. The .729 Redneck is more potent, as are a couple of other insane wildcat loads. However, almost nothing man-portable matches the destructive power of John Moses Browning’s gift to the U.S. Army. The barrel was thirty inches or so; the action, a huge block with a magazine six inches long and deep and an inch wide. The muzzle had a chambered brake on it to reduce recoil by diverting some of the gas sideways.

If hell had rules, we’d be hunting hell-meerkats with that thing. In Gutswana. From Damnzania.

I blundered through the door, squinting against the stabbing light, and saw a figure by the fire. My client had already arrived.

“Good day,” he said.

I recognized that beard, that proud stature, that voice. How many times had I led him, now?

“Hello, Mr. Hemingway.”

“Good morning,” he said. “Would you like some coffee? I find the local grind to be rather harsh, but it settles if brewed fast with a pinch of salt. I made do with some from the lick yonder.”

I accepted a cup. He was jittery and some spilled on my hand—hot, but not scalding. It also tasted somewhat better, as if free of hellephant dung.

“What is your pleasure to hunt today, Mr. Hemingway?” I asked.

“Please call me Ernie,” he said. “Eternity is too long for formality.”

“Ernie, then.”

“I wish to test my heart against that most fearsome of monsters from Earth’s nightmarish past.”

He would. The bloody fool. “It’s a good thing I have this fifty caliber, then, if we’re to hunt Demonosaurus Rex.”

I really needed a drink, if only to toast my pending demise in this iteration. The D. Rex was smarter than a hellefino by five percent or so, more massive than a Jumbo by a factor of two; fast, vicious, with jaws as strong as a car crusher. If a D. Rex caught someone (which it usually did), it would bite off whatever it reached first, which was relatively painless if the head, but much more so if a limb that it would then chew thoughtfully for a few seconds, fifteen feet over your screaming corpse-to-be, before bending down for a follow-up morsel. It regarded humans as a tasty snack food, and sought them as much as it sought any protein. It was a perfectly Hellfrican species, no matter when it had existed. Or still existed.

Not that I’d encountered one personally. All I had were reports from survivors who’d run while their second was consumed, who relayed the anecdote to me before dying themselves.

I said, “I take it we’re up near Lake Victgoria then.”

“Presumably, Mister Capstick,” he said. “I do know I have this.” He turned on his stool and bent, to bring up a Circassian-stocked double rifle with better lines than you’d see on the Rockettes. “Four-seventy nitro express.”

That’s my preferred big-game caliber, for Cadillacs, Mack Trucks and low-flying 747s, though I wasn’t sure it would even attract the attention of a D. Rex. I was also afraid it
would
attract that attention, without actually doing significant damage.