Reamde

“Dodge. You came.”

“You say that like you’re surprised.”

“I know you’re busy. Got a ton of stuff on your mind.”

“There’s always time for you, Chet. I’ve always tried to be clear about that.”

“It’s true. Appreciate it. Always have.”

“Don’t talk like that.”

“Aw, Dodge, you know I’m a dead man.”

“But you were a dead man once before—in the cornfield. Remember?”

“No. Had amnesia. Remember?” Chet laughed, and Richard grinned at him.

“That was when understanding came to me,” Chet went on, “about the parallels and the meridians. The fact that we live in curved space. Parallels run straight. Meridians bend toward each other and at their beginnings and their ends they are all one. When the Nautilus—the first nuclear sub—reached the North Pole, it transmitted a message. You know what the message was?”

“No,” Richard lied, even though he had heard Chet tell this story a hundred times to dumbfounded members of the Septentrion Paladins.

“‘Latitude ninety degrees north,’” Chet said. “See, they couldn’t specify their longitude, because there, all the meridians are one. They were on all the meridians, and so they were on none of them. It’s a singularity.”

Richard nodded.

“Birth and death,” Chet said. “The poles of human existence. We’re like meridians, all beginning and ending in the same place. We spread out from the beginning and go our separate ways, over seas and mountains and islands and deserts, each telling our own story, as different as they could possibly be. But in the end we all converge and our ends are as much the same as our beginnings.”

Richard kept nodding. He was afraid his voice wouldn’t work.

“Do you realize where we are?” Chet asked him.

“Somewhere pretty damned close to the border,” Richard finally got out.

“Not just close. Look!” Chet said, extending an arm in one direction, then swinging it over his head like the blade of a paper cutter to point exactly the opposite way. Following it, Richard noticed a line of widely spaced surveyor’s monuments tracking across the landscape.

“We’re on the forty-ninth parallel,” Chet said. “My feet are in the U.S. of A. and my head is in Canada.” The look on his face said that this was enormously profound to him, so Richard only nodded and tried to maintain a straight face. “I’m barring the path. Their meridians are going to end here.”

“Who are you talking about?”

Chet gestured vaguely to the north and then offered Richard the binoculars. Richard picked them up, adjusted them, planted his elbows on the border, and aimed them north toward the talus slopes angling down from the ridgeline. Gazing over them with his naked eyes, he was able to pick out a pair of human figures, spaced about a hundred feet apart, picking their way down over the rocks. With the aid of the binoculars he saw them clearly as armed men with dark hair, answering generally to the stereotypical image of jihadists. The one in the lead was burly and had a submachine gun slung over his shoulder. The one trailing behind was wiry and had a longer rifle slung diagonally across his back. A sniper.

“The rear guard,” Chet said. “Trying to catch up with the main group.” He chuckled and coughed wetly. Richard had a pretty good idea of what he was coughing up and so he avoided looking. Chet continued, “They’re so focused on catching up they haven’t bothered to look behind them.”

Richard drew back from the binoculars in surprise, and his aging eyes struggled to pull focus on Chet. Chet was nodding at him, casting suggestive glances upward. He had coughed a thin mist of blood out onto his chin, where it had caught in the gray stubble. Richard found the jihadists again and then tracked higher up the slope until he saw something in motion. Difficult to make out because its coloration blended in with the tawny hue of the weathered rock. Moving like a drop of glycerin oozing from one boulder to the next. Maintaining a fixed gaze on this target, he raised the binoculars and inserted them in his line of sight. With a bit of searching he was able to focus on the thing and see it distinctly as a mountain lion making its way down from the ridgeline. Its eyes glowed like phosphorus in the light of the rising sun. Those eyes were fixed upon the two men struggling down the slope below it.

“Holy crap,” Richard said. Chet went into another laughing/coughing fit. “These guys are so out of their element. Let’s hope it catches up with them soon.”

“It already did,” Chet answered. “Zula told me that it already took down one of their stragglers.”

“Huh. Man-eater.”

“They’re afraid of humans. Don’t bother them, and they won’t bother you,” Chet said, mocking what a sanctimonious tree hugger would say. Cougars attacked humans all the time in these parts, and the obstinate refusal of nature lovers to accept the fact that, in the eyes of a predator, there was no distinction between humans and other forms of meat had become the subject of bitter hilarity around the bar at the Schloss.