I panned the camera, following his gaze.
In the grass about thirty feet away, surrounding the truck, was a circle of tawny heads.
All the lions had manes. They were males. Two dozen male lions.
Abe was blinking, a finger to his open lips. He was so puzzled that confusion got the better of terror.
"Impossible," he whispered. "All males?"
It didn't make sense. Male lions just don't do that. A pride of lions consists of a dozen or so related female lions and one, sometimes two, at most three or four males, if it's an unusually large group. Adult male lions who aren't part of a pride will hunt alone. Never-absolutely never-in the wild do male lions congregate in large numbers. It just doesn't happen.
Except it was happening.
I kept rolling with the camera as the male lions began moving. They moved forward for a few steps, then stopped to allow the lion behind them to go forward. They seemed like trained soldiers, coordinated, choreographed, synchronized.
I expected Abe to stomp on the gas and get us the hell out of there. Instead, his mouth pinched into a hard set. Almost in a single fluid motion he raised the rifle to his shoulder, sighted, and fired. Off to the left, the head of the lion closest to the truck blew open and the animal slumped into the grass.
Abe was swinging his rifle around for the next one when the grass in front of the truck opened up and a golden blur streaked in front of the camera.
A paw caught Abraham in the face, and there was a cracking sound as he flipped out over the driver's-side door.
Chapter 21
FOR A LONG-much too long-moment, all I could do was sit there in the passenger seat of the truck as if my ass had been nailed to it.
I was visited with the same sudden, gut-squeezing spike of fear I'd experienced when I first jumped out of a Black Hawk as an Army Ranger medic in the Battle of Fallujah. I'd stood there at the door like a dunce with his dick in his hand, unable to move. Okay, here we go. Here we go. Okay, now. Paralysis. Here we go. I even did the same thing I'd done that day as bullets sang past my confused, cotton-filled head.
Act, jackass! I mentally screamed at myself. Do something!
Abe's gun was lying cockeyed across the driver's seat next to me. I snatched it up and anchored the barrel on the driver's-side door. The lion had Abe in his mouth, and was dragging him backward through the grass by the collar of his shirt.
The rifle kicked hard against my shoulder as I shot the lion in the head. I jumped out of the truck and ran the fifteen feet or so across the grass to where the dead lion lay and where Abe, his head pouring blood, was shakily climbing to his feet. My only goal at this point was to get us the hell out of there, get Abe to a doctor.
I draped his arm around me and we hobbled back to the truck. Abe was bigger than me and much heavier. It was slow going.
There was so much blood bursting from Abe's head I couldn't tell where the wounds were. I got him into the backseat of the truck, and I was trying to MacGyver a bandage out of his shirt when the truck rocked like a boat and almost tipped over. A lion had leaped onto the hood like a cat scrambling onto an armchair. He peered curiously through the windshield. His eyes were warm amber stones. They glowed like heat, blood, and honey.
I decided-if you want to call it that-the best place to be was under the steering wheel. I crawled into the front of the truck, toward the lion instead of away from it, a bit like a boxer leaning into a punch. I dropped under the steering wheel and squeezed myself in until I was crouching against the floorboard and clutching the gun. As I was waiting for my life to end, I reflected on the fact that the Rover was still running. I slammed my palm down on the gas pedal.
The engine roared in place, and nothing happened.
It wasn't in gear.
I pounded the clutch with my elbow and reached up and toggled the stick shift back and forth until I heard something catch. I let out the clutch and gave it some more gas with my other hand.
The truck lurched backward. I'd managed to put it in reverse, which was fine with me. We were moving. I pressed the accelerator onto the muddy floorboard with my palm and held it there, and I felt the driverless truck rocking and fishtailing at random across the grass. My head whacked against the steering wheel and the metal door frame as the Rover went bumping backward over the field. On the hood above me, I could hear the lion snarling; his claws clicked and shrieked against the glass.
With the car still in motion, I unwound a little from the fetal position to see his front paws and his massive shaggy head peeking over the top of the windshield-he looked like one of those old "Kilroy was here" drawings-and I reached up and cut the wheel hard to the left. The lion roared as he slid, scrabbling for purchase, off the windshield and fell beside the car, yelping as the Rover thumped against him.</ol>
And then we were flying. The Rover went airborne, backward off the steep riverbank, and for a moment, we were in the air. While bracing for impact, I had a good long two seconds of quiet time to reflect on the situation my life was in, and in those seconds, I decided that I really couldn't blame Natalie for dumping my ass. Then we hit the ground.
Chapter 22
ABE AND I both went sailing out of the Rover as it smashed backward into the riverbank a good ten feet below the sandy ridge. My body whumped into the muddy shore and the truck beside me tipped onto its side with a groan and a decisive crunch of metal, plastic, and glass.
I staggered to my feet, slapped mud from my face, and checked myself for injuries. I could feel bruises galore blooming all over my body, but nothing worse. The truck was still running, its engine panting, its back end submerged in muddy water. One sideways back wheel spun uselessly in the silt, stirring the muddy water.
Abe was in bad shape-as in probably dead. One of his legs was pinned beneath the sideways Rover, and his head was all wrong, almost perpendicular to his body. It looked like his neck had broken in the crash. He wasn't breathing.
I checked his pulse and wasn't surprised to find that he had none. Then I glanced up at the edge of the riverbank shelf we'd just been flung from. The heads of lions peered over it. A moment later they were spilling over its edge.
I backpedaled into the shallows of the river. There was one lion in particular-huge, bigger than the others, with a reddish mane and one eye. This one had it in for me. He came right for me.
I turned and dove deep into the river. Kicking as hard as I could, I swam as far out into the slow-moving muddy current as possible. This was a river in a time of drought-the water wasn't cold and it wasn't deep. It was warm, shallow, and dirty. I stood on my tiptoes in the middle of the river, and the water line was just below my head. I shook my hair, blinked water out of my eyes, spat, watched the shore. Abe's body was surrounded by six or seven lions, their manes rustling against each other. They pawed and picked at him as less majestic animals would do. But the other one, the big lion, strode past the sideways Rover and dove into the water after me, panting like mad as he paddled in my direction.
I'd thought I was safe. But no.
Lions hate water. They're not good swimmers-their dense, muscular bodies aren't built for it. They'll swim if necessary, to ford a river during the rainy season, for instance, but for a lion to chase prey into water is pretty much unheard-of.
I turned again and headed toward a sandy spit of land in the middle of the river.
Ten paces from the shore of the islet I saw a long black box bobbing in the water, drifting like a chunk of wood in the lazy current. Flotsam from the overturned Rover upstream. I splashed toward it, thinking I could maybe use it as a makeshift life preserver.
It was a life preserver, in fact: one of the gun cases Abe had brought. I snatched it from the water and slogged for the shore.
Stumbling, hurt, tired, with the gun case under my arm, I fought my way toward the reedy islet and felt the embankment rise under my heavy feet. I had no plan. I was beyond thinking. Ashore, I fell to my knees in the sucking reedy mud like a sinner in church, popped the clasps, thwack-thwack, and retrieved a flat-black bolt-action Mauser 98, a truly badass piece of machinery that had a barrel gauge like a plumbing pipe.
What had Abraham said? I thought as I slung the bandolier over my shoulder and filled the magazine to its limit. Better to have it and not need it.
Walking slowly backward onto the islet, I took aim at the giant cat that was paddling toward me in the river like a dog. He was mere feet away, emerging from the river, shaking off, flinging a thousand twinkling beads of water from his mane. I squared up the rifle, aimed between his eyes, and squeezed the trigger. The gun butt rocketed against my shoulder and the lion went down before me like a sack of potatoes, tumbling in a sopping heap into the river mud. PETA, forgive me. It was a beautiful creature, but it was also a very big, beautiful creature that was trying to kill me.
I turned my eyes back to the riverbank. I watched in disbelief as the lions loosed Abe's corpse from underneath the truck and hauled him back up the steep, sandy embankment.
Chapter 23
I SAT FOR a long time on the shore of the river island, staring at the spot on the opposite riverbank where the lions had carried off Abe's body. I didn't think they would come back for me, but I kept the rifle in my lap with the safety off as I sat on the muddy islet, reflected on what had just happened, caught my breath, and collected my wits.
Beside me, the lion I'd just killed lay on his side, sinking into the loose mud, his back legs in the river, tail floating, blood darkening the grass and eddying in the brown water.</ol>