Bestiary

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

He’d never been the praying kind — God, when he thought about Him at all, was just some old guy in the sky to whom he might one day have to apologize — but wrapped in his fireproof blanket, the air like a furnace baking all around him, Sadowski was praying with all the earnest devotion of some medieval monk. He was sucking desperately at the oxygen in the sheath itself, and holding each breath for as long as he could, but he still didn’t know if he’d be able to outlast the fire. Fortunately, he must have been lying on a spot where the grass had already been burned away, and no bushes or shrubs were too close by, because the waves of fire seemed to pass over him swiftly, seeking new fuel. God, he was thinking, please don’t let me burn alive. Please don’t let me die here. I wasn’t really going to let Tate die out there — I’d have let him back in the car, I swear. And I wasn’t going to shoot Greer, either — much as he deserved it. The people I killed in Iraq — well, that was war, and they were Muslims anyway. They don’t believe in you — or they believe in some crazy other version of you that isn’t true — and I can’t believe it’s a sin, no matter how you look at it, to kill somebody who’s trying to kill you first.

All around him, he could still hear the crackling of the underbrush as it burned, and the occasional thump of a tree branch, severed from its trunk, crashing onto the street. Man, those incendiaries that Burt Pitt had designed sure as hell did their job — so well, in fact, that they’d nearly cost him his ass. He wondered if the others would go off with as much success — members of the Sons of Liberty had spread them all over the place, in ragged lines all across the Santa Monica Mountain Range and Topanga State Park, up and down from the Riviera Country Club to the Palisades Highlands and Summit View — and they had all been timed to cause maximum damage. Fifteen minutes after one set went off, and the fire department’s resources had been diverted to deal with the blaze, another set would go off miles away. There wouldn’t be enough firefighters or equipment on the entire west coast of the United States to stop the cataclysm that would follow.

And wouldn’t America wake up on the fifth of July with a whole new attitude about the threat posed by open borders?

The air in the bag was gone, and he could feel his own hot sweat pooling in the small of his back; his clothes were stuck on him like a wetsuit. The noise around him had subsided, and he thought it might be safe to pull the zipper down an inch or two and test the air. The second he did, a film of black ash fell onto his face, and he sputtered to get it off his lips and out of his mouth. But there wasn’t any fire to be seen, at least not through that tiny opening, and he had started to pull the zipper down a little more — damn, it was sticking — when he heard what sounded like footsteps, approaching from the street. Tate, he thought — he’d survived it somehow after all. And while his first impulse was to cry out for some help — come on, the danger was over now, couldn’t they just act like buddies once again? — he wasn’t sure that Tate wouldn’t harbor some grudge. He might take advantage of Sadowski’s defenseless position — wrapped in a bag with a stuck zipper — to beat the shit out of him.

The footsteps had stopped, and Sadowski wondered what Tate was thinking. Was he wondering why Sadowski hadn’t outfitted him with an asbestos sheath, too? Had he been burned — badly — by the fire? Was he going to be really hard to look at?

And what should he, Sadowski, do? Should he play dead? Or should he say something, or stir inside the bag, to show that he was still alive in there? His fingers instinctively reached for the gun that he now regretted having left in the car.

The footsteps came closer, but they sounded heavy and hard. Maybe Tate was on his last legs. That wouldn’t actually be so bad; if he died, Sadowski could take his wallet and ID off of him, and his body would probably never be identified; there’d be a lot of unidentified remains by tomorrow, Sadowski figured.

Either way, Sadowski hoped he had a full canteen on him; his throat was parched and he’d left his own water supply in the Explorer.

Sadowski didn’t hear anything more, but he sensed someone very close by, and even through the small aperture he could smell something now — but it wasn’t like human sweat or flesh, even of the slightly cooked kind. He knew those smells pretty damn well, from the white phosphorus attacks they’d laid down on the insurgents in Iraq. No, this was a different smell, but it, too, took him back to the desert… to the day that Captain Greer had talked them all into that little extracurricular mission outside Mosul. It was the smell he’d encountered in that empty zoo in al-Kalli’s palace… where the bars of the cages were bent like they’d been hit with battering rams… and Lopez, the poor dead son of a bitch, had helped to press on the wings of that iron peacock… to reveal the box that Greer claimed he had never opened.

He decided not to call out. Or move. Or give any sign of life at all.

But the footsteps came closer anyway. And something was strange about that, too. It didn’t sound like two footsteps at a time… but four.

Sadowski tried to pull the zipper closed again, but it was stuck firmly in place.

And the smell — of scorched fur and rugged hide — got much stronger.

Sadowski froze, not so much as breathing anymore.

But something was breathing — and it was directly above him now. As he peered through the hole in the bag, he saw a green eye, as big as a baseball, looking back down at him. He felt a trickle of urine stream down his leg.

The creature snorted — its breath was as fetid as a garbage dump — and Sadowski felt a broad paw grazing the top of the bag… looking for a way in.

Jesus, Mary, Mother of God, God Almighty… Sadowski couldn’t think the words fast enough. And he couldn’t think of anything else he could do; he could barely move his arms and legs anyway.

The gentle pawing became more firm, and Sadowski could swear that he heard the click of the creature’s claws suddenly extending; one of them, an evil, crooked talon, hooked itself inside the tiny opening at the top of the bag and drew the zipper down as smoothly as a tailor. Sadowski lay there like a sardine in an opened can, while above him he saw what looked like a giant hyena, a mottled beast with hanging fangs and a thick matting of black fur all across its shoulders and neck.

Sadowski wanted to jump up and run, but his feet were still tangled in the bottom of the sheath, and when he tried to kick them free, the creature reared up on its hind legs, the black fur flying out like a cape, like the wings you’d see on a vampire bat. And then — just as Sadowski had mustered enough spit to scream — the beast threw back its head and let out a howl of its own, more bone-chilling than anything Sadowski had ever heard, and loud enough to drown out his own cry altogether.

Then it fell forward — jaws open and claws out — its black fur wrapping itself like a reeking veil around his thrashing head.