Reamde

They passed over a partially forested slope rising up from the waterfall toward a wildly uneven plateau of boulders and snowfields and clustered trees. Above that rose a much broader and higher talus slope that, according to the pilot, was a mile or two north of the border and roughly parallel to it. The rock wall rising out of that was pierced in one place by a man-made opening, evidently the adit of an old mine.

“Someone painted the rock,” Yuxia observed.

“Where?” Seamus asked.

“Right below us,” Yuxia said.

Seamus’s gaze had been directed horizontally and north, but he now looked straight down and saw that Yuxia was right. What he had identified, a few moments ago, as a gnarled tree, branches covered with brilliant green sprigs of new leaves, was, on closer examination, a snarl of acid-green spray paint on a rock. Like graffiti. Except impossible to make sense of.

He could see now the faint traces of a trail, leading down to the graffiti from the north, coming from the approximate direction of that old mine tunnel. On the talus it was nearly imperceptible, but from place to place he saw tufts of fresh litter, and in one location it was absolutely clear that someone had glissaded down a snowfield, carving two parallel tracks, still crisp at the edges, not yet blurred by a day’s, or even an hour’s, exposure to the warmth of the sun.

He followed the track upward and was shocked to see, some distance above it, a dead man spread-eagled on a rock.

“Holy shit,” the pilot said, seeing it too.

“Let’s get a better look at that,” Seamus said, feeling that weird sensation again: the adrenaline coming back into his system. The chopper pointed its nose down and accelerated north.

They were passing over that grooved snowfield when Yuxia let out a gasp that was almost a scream. “He’s waving at us!” she called.

“Who’s waving at us?” Seamus returned skeptically. For the man on the boulder definitely wasn’t doing any waving, and that was the only man Seamus could see.

“I think it’s Zula’s uncle,” Yuxia answered. “I saw him on Wikipedia.”

A crack, explosively loud, sounded from above them. Then two more.

“What the hell?” said the pilot in the weird silence that followed. Silence being, in general, a bad thing in a helicopter.

“We’re being shot at,” Seamus said. For he had heard similar noises before. In general, military choppers stood up to the treatment a little better than this one had. “They have taken out the engine. Bite down.” He twisted around so that Yuxia could see his face, opened his mouth, inserted the helicopter company brochure, and bit down on it, keeping his lips peeled back grotesquely so that she could see his jaws clenched together.

Staring at him fixedly, she reached up with one hand, bit down on the end of her camouflage mitten, then pulled her naked hand out of it.

“Brace for impact,” the pilot said. But halfway through this utterance, Seamus stopped hearing his voice in the headphones, because another round seemed to have gone through the middle of the instrument panel and fucked up the electrical system.

The pilot, to his great credit, knew what to do: he manipulated the controls in such a way as to make the chopper autorotate, converting some of the energy of its fall into passive spinning of the rotors that broke the descent marginally. That, and the fact that they landed at an angle on the snowfield, saved them. Even so, the impact was so sharp that Seamus felt his teeth jumping in their sockets. Because he was biting down, they didn’t slam together and they didn’t bite his tongue off and he hoped that the same was true of the others.

The chopper planted its nose in the snow and began to skid downhill like a big out-of-control toboggan. Directly in front of them were trees. Standing in front of the trees was—just as Yuxia had been trying to tell him—Richard Forthrast. A.k.a. Dodge.

He dodged.

The trees didn’t.

THE TEN OR fifteen seconds between the appearance of the chopper in the sky above him and its coming to rest in the trees, only a few yards away from where he had thrown himself to the ground, presented Richard with an unbroken chain of never-before-experienced sensations that, in other times, he’d have spent several weeks sifting through and making sense of. There was something in the modern mind that would not stop saying, If only I had caught that on video, or This is going to make the coolest blog entry ever! Barring which, he at least wanted to just lie there for a few moments asking himself whether that had really just happened.