2 cobra 15

 

 

Chapter 15

 

The shot woke Willow up, as she has a subdermal mic on me. She told me later that she had woken terrified.

“Rick!” she bellowed.

“It’s all right, honey, I shot a deer,” I muttered. “But if you’re awake I’d take it kindly if you’d check for bandits to the north.”

“Right,” she said.

“Did you call me ‘honey’?” asked Dave, who had also been awakened by the shot.

“No, I was talking to the drone operator, who was as startled as the deer was,” I said. “You have that blonde one following you, the one with the peach of a chassis and go-to-hell eyes. I call her ‘honey’ to irritate her. I haven’t made the drone flounce yet, though.”

“You’re a gadfly,” said Dave.

“It’s taken you this long to notice?” I said. “Here, keep an eye on my deer; I woke with a full bladder and honey isn’t ready for the glory of me emptying it in sight of her.”

I wanted a bit of privacy for Willow to talk to me; and I did have a full bladder as well.

“You’re right, Rick, there’s a party of three yakusa approaching from the north. They’re about two miles away which in this terrain is at least half an hour.”

I went back to Dave.

“Take one of my knives and cut the longjohns in strips,” I said. I turned to the deer, and methodically cut it open. Not easy with a stone knife and no bone saw to separate the pelvis; but flint is very sharp, and I had spent some of the time sitting and warming myself in knapping better edges. It occurred to  me that thus had cave men also spent their time.

It takes an expert about five minutes to gut a deer; with the stone knife, splitting the sternum was harder, but I did in well under ten.

I lifted out the guts and managed to smear the drone which was on duty with body fluids whilst I did so. It had come close to film my efforts. It shot back.

“Do you know how to use a shotgun?” I asked Dave. He nodded, eyes wide.

“There are five shots left,” I warned him. “Keep it warm. Cuddle the mechanism to you.”

He did not ask questions; I’d be happier with him as a partner for that than some of the idiots I’ve been forced to work with. He passed me the lengths of knit cotton. I threw the lengths over my shoulder, and picked up the guts in one hand.

There was a game trail which led towards the lake; they would be fools not to follow a game trail. I took the guts and buried them partly in snow just at the side of the trail. There were canine footprints with claws visible, and feline footprints with claws retracted. With a bit of luck a few coyotes would come for the guts and irritate the yakusa.

I went back up the trail.

 

 I pulled down another sapling, and tied one end of longjohn strip to the top of it. I added strips until I had enough length to make a noose.  I did not have time to find mud to stain it; I used the strips to clean my hands of blood and slime.  I had to somehow tie the sapling down.

I took a forked branch and hammered it into the ground with my club. We’d tramped all over the place, so footsteps did not matter.  I used another length of underwear to tie that down.

Well-dirtied, I tied the rest of the strips together and stretched them between two trees, and the end of the piece tying the tree to the fork to that.

In an ideal world, if one of them stepped in the noose, stepping forward would jerk the peg loose too. It isn’t an ideal world, so there was a second chance to jerk the peg loose if one of the others found my tripwire the hard way. It was damnably dark once out of the clearing, so I hoped that they would not show good ninja skills.

I was fairly sure that they would assume that I had next to nothing, as the shotgun was broken – they saw it jam on the trid, no doubt – and even if they knew why it had jammed, I believed they would not expect me to get it working again. There were three of them against one of me, essentially unarmed and not properly clad. They would be looking into the light in the clearing, wanting to move forward fast and kill me before I knew I was dead.

The clock was ticking.

By this time I had about ten minutes max before they got here.

“Dave,” I said, “Go downstream. As it narrows and becomes deeper there’s a bit of a gorge. You’ll find the girls there. I am going to perform extreme violence, and I don’t want it causing you trouble. No, don’t argue; I can protect myself but if I have to protect you as well, it might kill me. Please go.”

He handed me back the shotgun, and nodded.

He would have tried to help, bless him, but he took my point about being in the way.

 

I heard growling, and a yell.

“Rick, you didn’t leave those guts, did you?”  Willow was sniggering in my ear.

“I did, I was hoping for coyotes,” I said.

“You didn’t get coyotes, but you got a bear,” Willow sniggered. “Looks like he thought one of the yak were after his treat of deer guts.”

There was the harsh chatter of submachine gun fire.

“What’s the damage?” I asked Willow. The TV drone had gone to see what was going on.

“The bear has hurt one of them, but went down under fire,” said Willow. “You got a blanket now, anyway.”

I sniggered too, and moved round the clearing, staying in cover. There were a couple more yells, and I could see a suddenly popped up sapling waving wildly.

If it didn’t get anyone, they were certainly startled. And I could see that one of them had measured his length on my trip-rope. It was the one whose face had been clawed half off.

I left him to step out to see who was still active.

The one who was, raised his AK69, and I let fly with the shotgun.

He was very surprised; but not for long.

Then Dave and the two girls ran into the clearing, with makeshift weaponry.

“Are we too late for the excitement?” asked Julie.

“Mostly,” I said.

My tree trap had caught Isamu Fukuhama.

“Are you going to kill me here in cold blood?” he asked.

“Oh, no,” I said. “But you will die with cold blood. I’m going to leave you in the same state I was left, in underclothes and boots, you and your man. Your aeroplane won’t be there if you head for the lake. I’ve taken care of that. You sicken me because you put the other competitors at undue risk as well.”

I let him down and we tied up him and the rather beary one. In disarming them we found some nice sharp knives, which we took.  We shoved the two live ones in the shelter which was, I thought, unduly nice of us. I gutted the bear and we tied it to a pole to carry to the girls’ cave, and then we went back for the deer. We also collected the best branches both for building and burning, and then we turned to our captives, whose shelter had been somewhat diminished by robbing out the wood.

The girls and Dave helped me strip the live ones and the dead one, and that meant clothes for the girls and I finally had a pair of pants. The anoraks would be for whoever went out to forage, which would be mostly me.

They had seen the proper way to make a shelter and I left them to it.

Isamu went for me.

I cold-cocked him.

“You’d better get him off the cold earth or if he dies, it’ll be your fault,” I said to his henchman.

He already had eyes which were too bright and a hectic flush to the unclawed side of the face; he was burning up with fever, which Isamu could take advantage of for his own survival. I doubted his lieutenant would live.

So sorry, omae, not sorry.

He was in no condition to follow us and we had all, as a matter of course, walked down the bed of the stream. Dave’s boots had leaked but we now had two spare pairs of boots. I dried his boots slowly and his socks as fast as I could without them scorching, and set a birch cup with bear fat in it to turn into good bear grease, both for his boots and to smear on our own bodies. We would stink like nothing on earth, but it would help keep out the cold. And whilst Dave and the girls extended their shelter, I gave my attention to skinning and jointing our meat. Having an anorak, I took off my undershirt, which was one of those horrible string ones, and turned it inside-out for some modicum of hygiene, to tie at the bottom and hang with lumps of meat in it from a tree branch to keep it safe.  I found a hollow tree trunk and used the webbing and hooks on it, and tortured D-rings, to hang meat on, on the inside of the trunk, with a quick tile of bark covering most of the top, and lit a fire with chips of oak.

“You know it takes weeks to smoke meat, don’t you?” said Elizabeth.

“Right is right,” I said. “And maybe some park ranger will take it over.”

She laughed.

We might take it out semi-smoked just to eat, of course; we all had hearty appetites. I am not fond of kidney, but I’m less fond of being hungry, and we found a large stone with a bit of a dip in it, which, well larded with bear fat, did a decent job as a frying pan for sliced kidney, liver and heart. We ate the sort of mixed grill I suspect most people would turn up their noses at, and enjoyed every mouthful.

It was more than thirty hours since any of us had eaten.

“You’re a fair cook,” conceded Elizabeth.

“My wife says I’m competent,” I said.

We stocked up on wood again, and with a katana – yes, I know, using a fine weapon as a plebian tool is improper – managed to cut wood we would otherwise have had to discard. I found some cat tails further downstream, and made a rough bucket out of the buckskin in which to put hot stones to keep it boiling.

I went and dug a latrine pit with my spade shaped lump of wood, shaped a bit better with one of our new knives. With food inside us, there would be more waste.

It was a lot warmer in pants; and it was a lot warmer with four of us inside, and with bellies full of hot food. The bearskin didn’t hurt either.

“We’d better stand watches,” I said. “And with the AKs at that. I don’t feel right about using them for game.”

“He has a funny sense of morality,” mocked Elizabeth.

I shrugged.

“It’s my own,” I said. “Oh, by the way, the fellow who was bribed? I was planning to give you this, which he had in his pocket. Thought it might help out the fund.” I passed her the cred stick he had had in his pants pocket.

 

She goggled.

“This... this would cover more than half of Irene’s operation,” she said. “Is this what he was paid to kill you?”

“Yup,” I said.

“I’m in the wrong profession,” she said.

“No, you’re not,” I told her. “You didn’t like me killing that rabbit in the desert. You looked away while I dealt with the food. You couldn’t stand aside from the thought of taking life and that would get you killed.”

She stared at me.

“You can’t be... you are compassionate....”

“Don’t make assumptions just because I’m not afraid to defend myself or kill animals for food, if you please,” I said. “Ichiro Fukuhama made an error in judgement and died in the last task. I don’t grieve him; I didn’t like him, and I am pretty certain he had made attempts on my life in earlier tasks. His family have decided that I am responsible. I have to live with the results of his mistakes.  It makes me rather unsympathetic about those who have been coming to kill me when I’m already facing an extreme physical test. Please speculate about why they have made this decision on your own time.”

The error in judgement Ichiro Fukuhama made was in not suggesting negotiations, and in then irritating me further, not in his jumping, but I wasn’t about to say that.

“I’m sorry, Jay,” Elizabeth said. “You certainly know how to handle weapons.”

“I’ve served in the military,” I said.

“It’s a damned shame,” said Dave. “But there’s safety in numbers and we can take turns to watch.”

We could.

I was perhaps a fool in leaving Isamu alive; but I did not think he would survive very long. I had said the plane was gone; well, it was a hint to Willow to do something to deal with that, but I had not heard it take off, nor had I heard any booms. If I was Isamu....

If I was Isamu, I’d carry my sick buddy back to the plane, because that’s who and what I am. I suspected that Isamu would leave him to die, more of bear-raked cheek than bare faced cheek.

Life’s about choices. And putting my new friends at risk meant the family had chosen to irritate me. Which was going to prove fatal for them.