The Fear in Yesterday's Rings

by George C. Chesbro

  “You tame wild things, Robby. It’s your nature. But wild things can take care of themselves. From everything I’ve read and heard about you, you’re likely now to try something impossibly heroic because you think you have to try to save me from being degraded. I’ve also read that you’re deceptively quick and powerful. You might even be able to take this skinny guy with the gun on you.”

  I glanced back through the rear window. The potbellied man had finished relieving himself and was zipping up his pants. In response to our whispered conversation, the man in the front seat had stiffened and was concentrating even harder on keeping his pistol aimed at the exact center of my forehead; if there had ever been a chance of surprising and disarming him while his companion had his way with Harper, it was gone now.

  “Thanks a lot, Harper,” I said with a deep sigh, looking up at the car roof. “I can always use that kind of encouragement.”

  “You’re angry with me because you’re thinking that I’ve put this other jerk-off on guard and made it harder for you to put some kind of move on him,” Harper whispered urgently as the other gunman came around to her door. “Well, you might have succeeded in taking away his gun, and then again, you might have been killed. Do me a favor, Robby. Let this wild thing take care of herself. For a woman who’s known as many men as I have, I’d be most surprised if the fat jerk-off has anything new to show me, unless his whang has polka dots. You may be surprised to see how this works out. So just sit still.”

  There was no way I was going to try to put a move on anybody; any plans I might have had to take advantage of the potbellied gunman’s temporary distraction were canceled now. Not only had Harper put Janek doubly on his guard, but she’d taken the heart out of me. So I sat still, staring off into space, as the fat man jerked the rear door open, grabbed Harper’s arm, and started to drag her from the car.

  “Easy, big guy, easy,” Harper said, abruptly pulling out of the man’s grasp and stepping out of the car herself. “I want you as much as you want me, remember? So there’s no need for any rough stuff. Now, let’s go find us some nice private place. I’ve got a few tricks I want to show you.”

  Harper slammed the door shut, then took the man’s hand and pulled him away into the night, toward a clump of bushes about seventy-five yards away that stood out in silhouette like an atoll in a sea of darkness against the flat, empty horizon. I sank back in the seat, crossed my arms over my chest, and stared back at the man in the front seat who was aiming his gun at my head.

  “Fuck you,” I said with a big grin, just to see if he understood any English at all.

  He either didn’t understand or didn’t care. He just kept staring and aiming his gun.

  In my disgust and hurt and general all-around disappointment with Harper, another thought was clearing its throat in the back of my mind, trying to get my attention. It finally did. Harper was indeed a wild thing, I thought, but unless I had completely read her wrong, her behavior in the last few minutes was totally out of character. She was sexy, yes, and certainly passionate, but I simply could not understand why she would seduce a man she had to know fully intended to see her dead, no matter what she did.

  And how could I possibly be surprised by how it was going to work out?

  Suddenly, there came from the darkness in the direction of the bushes a sharp, high-pitched shout that could have been a cry of passion. The gaunt man in the front seat started, momentarily took his eyes off me to look out the window toward the bushes. We waited together and didn’t have to wait long. Half a minute later, Harper, flushed and out of breath from running, appeared at the side of the car. She began pounding her fists against Janek’s window, apparently heedless of the gun in the man’s hand.

  “Come with me!” she shouted at Janek, pointing to her chest and making gasping sounds. “Quickly! There’s something wrong! I think your friend has had a heart attack! Come on!”

  The gunman, obviously torn between the need to attend to whatever emergency had come up and the imperative to guard his charge, kept looking back and forth between Harper’s twisted face at the window and me, nervously licking his lips as his pronounced Adam’s apple bounced up and down in his throat. Harper hurried things along by finally yanking his door open and grabbing his arm—an action that made me wince and duck down. But the gun didn’t go off.

  “Come on! Your friend’s dying!”

  Janek made his decision. He got out of the car, grabbed Harper. He put the gun to her head, then spoke to me rapidly in Polish or Hungarian, pointing first to me, then at the car.

  “I think I’ve got it, Janek,” I said drily, emphasizing my words with slow and elaborate sign language. “If I get out of the car, you’ll shoot the woman. Bang-bang.”

  The man nodded enthusiastically as I again leaned back in my seat and crossed my arms over my chest. Then I watched through the window as Harper pulled him off in the direction of the bushes.

  Things did not bode any better for Janek than they had for his potbellied colleague, I thought with a grim smile. I knew that I had been a fool.

  Two or three minutes; there was another sharp cry, this one louder than the first, and then some enthusiastic but abbreviated cursing in Polish or Hungarian. I waited another minute, then got out of the car and walked slowly toward the black outline of the bushes.

  I found Harper behind and slightly to the right of the clump of bushes, squatting down in the grass between the corpses of the two gunmen. In the faint moonlight I could just make out the men’s faces, and it was obvious that they had died not only quickly but unpleasantly; the flesh on their necks and the lower parts of their faces was swollen and black. Harper’s head was bowed, and she seemed to be fighting for breath. In her right hand she held the small, carved wooden box I had previously seen her take from her purse. She was holding her right wrist with her left hand. I stayed a distance away.

  “Harper?” I said quietly.

  She looked up at me, and in the moonlight I saw her wry smile. “What’s the matter with you, Robby? Don’t you understand Polish? Didn’t you hear that man tell you you were supposed to wait in the car?”

  “Is your little pet and traveling companion back where it belongs?”

  Still holding her right wrist, she shifted around and slipped the wooden box into the left front pocket of her jeans. “Yeah,” she said thickly. “It was kind of hard to find the little guy the second time; the first time, he just jumped right out of the box onto the guy’s neck. Pretty effective—better defense than Mace, huh?”

  “No question about it.”

  She sucked in a deep breath, slowly exhaled. “God, I was so afraid it was dead—I hadn’t fed or given it water in a long time. I was able to put it in my pocket when they let me go to the bathroom. I told them I had my period and needed my purse.”

  I went to her, put my hands under her arms, and gently lifted her to her feet. She had begun to tremble violently, and I held her tight, stroking her long hair, kissing her lips, neck, cheeks, and forehead. “God, Harper, you’re a pisser,” I whispered hoarsely in her ear. “All that talk about wild things; you wanted to make certain I didn’t get hurt trying to rescue you, because you were about to rescue me. You knew they were dead men.”

  Now she pulled away from me, stared hard into my face. There were tears welling in her maroon eyes, sliding down her cheeks. “You should have heard your voice back there, Robby. You sounded like you hated me.”

  “I’m so sorry, Harper,” I said, pulling her back close to me, kissing away her tears. “I was going for the world-class professional stupid cup. Please forgive me.”

  After a few moments she sighed heavily, nodded, leaned hard against me. The tears had stopped, but now I noticed that her flesh felt cold and clammy, and I wondered if she was going into shock. I pushed her away, looked into her face. Her eyes seemed slightly out of focus.

  “Harper, are you all right? Did either of them hurt you?”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m all
right.”

  I looked around me in the darkness and shuddered as I suddenly felt a stab of fear. I walked quickly over to the dead men, neither of whom had even come close to making it a hundred feet after the krait had bitten them. I searched their bodies until I found their guns, put the weapons in the pockets of my suit jacket, then took Harper’s hand and started to lead her back toward the car. She stumbled, and would have fallen if I hadn’t caught her.

  “Harper?”

  “I’m all right.”

  “Come on. We have to get back to the car. Quickly.”

  “Robby? Why—?”

  “Unless I’m seriously mistaken, we were brought out here to empty city to serve as lobox bait. They probably would have let us out of the car, maybe with a warning to go and sin no more and to count our blessings. We’d have been wandering around out here looking for a house, and then the thing would have been on us. I still have my wallet in my pocket, and your purse is probably somewhere in the car; werewolves don’t have much use for credit cards or money, so they didn’t want those items to be missing from our corpses. You and I were scheduled to be the werewolf’s next victims. Zelezian has used your sweater and my jacket to prime the lobox, and I’m certain it’s on its way now, tracking us—or the scent of the car.”

  “Oh, God, you’re right,” Harper said, and then she too began looking around.

  We walked quickly to the car. I helped Harper into the passenger’s seat, then hurried around the rusting Plymouth and got in behind the wheel. I made sure all the doors were locked, turned on the interior light, and checked the weapons I had taken from the gunmen. One was a .45 automatic with a full clip, and the other a snub-nosed Colt Cobra with a full cylinder. I put the safety on the Colt, which I judged would have the least kick, and offered the weapon to Harper, who was turned slightly away from me. “Can you use this, babe?”

  Harper turned her head to look at the gun, hesitated, then finally shook her head. “Not right now, Robby,” she said in a small voice. “I’m a little shook up, and I’d rather you had both of them. Can we get going?”

  “We can, but I don’t think we should. If I’m right, and we were brought out here to give that lobox another trial run, it’s not going to do us any good to drive away. It will follow the smell of this damn car, and it will keep searching for us, coming at us, no matter where we are. Luther said it was incredibly tenacious, and I believe him. Maybe it’s tracking us now, maybe not, but I do know that we’ll never have a better chance than this to turn the tables and nail the son-of-a-bitch if it is coming at us. If we go, then there’s no telling when and where one or both of us may find the fucking thing leaping out of some shadow to tear our guts out. If it’s been primed, then it will keep searching until it finds us, and then we’re dead. Now, at least, we know where it is. We’re ready for it. I say we solve our lobox problem while we have the opportunity and the advantage. Then I have to give some thought to the problem of getting my brother away from them.”

  “I say we go back and kill the Zelezians. That will solve the problem.”

  I blinked, surprised, somewhat taken aback by the purpose and ferocity in her voice. I was at once pleased, because her outrage and obvious willingness to take extreme risks meant that I had an increased number of options. At the same time, her rage made me a bit nervous. I did not want Harper Rhys-Whitney, this woman I certainly lusted after, and feared I loved, to be harmed. I couldn’t do anything about the extreme danger she already faced, but I didn’t want her anger to put her in any more danger or to provoke her to harsh or hasty action.

  “That’s certainly a possibility to consider,” I said carefully. “But that might not be so easy, and if we failed, we’d be in an even worse situation. Even if we succeeded, we’d still have a lobox on our trail. We don’t have a lot of time, and things could get very complicated. If we decide to go to the police, it would help a great deal to have a dead lobox in the trunk of the car as proof of our story. But even then, I’m not sure I’d trust the police or the state troopers to get my brother out of there safely. Along with your safety, Garth has to be my number one priority.”

  “Damn right,” Harper said with the same quiet intensity. “But I still say we just go right back there—wherever ‘there’ is—and kill the bastards now. Just give me a little time to get myself together, and I’ll be able to handle one of those guns. You show me how it works, and I’ll kill the bastards myself. I’m a lot madder at them than I am at any lobox.”

  I reached across the seat and gently stroked her back. “One step at a time, Harper,” I said softly. “We—and Garth—can’t afford for us to make a mistake. Let’s wait to see what’s hunting us before we decide how we’re going to hunt the Zelezians.”

  “Okay,” Harper said quietly, after a pause. She was silent, breathing rather heavily, for some time, then added, “Where do you suppose we are?”

  “I haven’t got the slightest idea. I was dragged most of the time. But we can assume that the circus has at least moved on one more stop. I was bouncing all over the cage they had me in for what seemed like hours.”

  “It was hours—almost eight. There was a clock inside the trailer where they kept me.”

  “Then they’ve made just one move?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then, according to that schedule we saw, the circus is out of Kansas and into Nebraska—home sweet home for me. It should be set up near a town called Stonebridge, and we can’t have been driven too far from it. That’s where we’ll find Garth and the Zelezians—when we’re ready to call.”

  I waited for a response, but there was none. Harper’s breathing, although still ragged, was more regular than it had been; exhaustion, rage, fear, and tension had finally taken their toll, and she had fallen asleep. I put the .45 and the Colt on the seat beside me, took off my suit jacket, and covered her with it. Then I turned around, got up on my knees, and, resting my chin on the back of the seat, stared back the way the car had come, looking for a dark shape moving on the horizon, a deadly shadow in the moonlight, listening for the sound of scratching or sniffing at the doors.

  The clock in the car wasn’t working, and I’d lost my wrist-watch, but I estimated that more than two hours had passed when the horizon off to the east began to glow, and the surrounding landscape became dimly visible in the first light of the false dawn. Although I was certain that a lobox, by now, would have easily covered the ten miles or so that comprised its scent range, I had still not seen or heard anything.

  Perhaps, I drought, the gunmen had planned to simply shoot us and dump us in a ditch by the side of the road after all.

  It was certainly good news that we were alive, but I was disappointed not to find a lobox on our trail. The Zelezians had articles of our clothing; just because a lobox had not been primed and sent to kill us on this night didn’t mean that it wouldn’t happen in the future, when we would not know the beast was coming, or where it was coming from. Also, I would have dearly loved to have a dead lobox for show-and-tell with the local police or the state troopers; eventually, we were going to have to explain the two corpses with swollen black necks and faces lying in the grass seventy-five yards away.

  Already, with the failure of the two gunmen to return to the circus, Arlen and Luther Zelezian had been warned that something was wrong. Perhaps they were, even at that moment, hastily shutting down the whole operation, moving their breeding stock of loboxes. Perhaps preparing to kill Garth.

  Shit, I thought as I stared out over the still, silent landscape. In fact, double shit.

  “Robby,” Harper said wearily, stirring, “I’ve got to pee.” She sounded terrible.

  I studied the landscape some more, turning all the way around in my seat. There was still no sound, except for an occasional birdcall, no sign of movement, and yet the muscles in my stomach ached from tension. I said, “Climb over the seat and pee in the back.”

  “I think I may have to do more than pee.”

  “Do it in the back.”<
br />
  She laughed weakly. “Robby, I really don’t think I know you well enough to exercise my excretory functions in front of you. I hope I never know you that well. How would I maintain my mystique?”

  “Harper, this is really no time to worry about your modesty or your mystique. I promise I won’t peek or listen. I don’t want you to get out of the car.”

  “You haven’t seen or heard anything, have you?”

  “No, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing out there.”

  “I have to go, Robby. I’ll only be a minute.”

  “All right,” I said, reaching for the key in the ignition, “just hold on a little longer. Let me drive ahead a few hundred yards to the top of the hill up there where I can get a better view.”

  I turned the key in the ignition. The engine of the old Plymouth ground and whined, but didn’t start. I shut off the ignition, gave it a rest for thirty seconds, and tried it again, with the same result. Cursing under my breath, I pumped the accelerator—and knew I’d flooded the engine when I smelled gasoline.

  Harper sighed, shifted in her seat. “I’ll be all right, Robby. Don’t worry. There’s nothing out there.”

  When Harper raised her right arm from her side where she had been cradling it and reached for the door handle, I could see that the flesh of her wrist was a mottled gray, swollen from wrist to elbow to more than the diameter of her hand. I grabbed her left arm, pulled her across the seat to me as I felt my heart begin to pound.

  “Harper, you’ve been bitten! Jesus Christ!”

  She apparently didn’t have the strength to struggle, for she simply slumped against my shoulder, weakly nodded her head. “It got me when I was trying to get it off the second man’s neck. Careless of me.”

  “I have to get you to a hospital!”

  “Too … late, Robby. I mean, it would have been too late hours ago. There’s nothing you, or anybody else, can do for me. There’s no specific anti-krait venom in the United States. If the people at the hospital knew what they were doing, the first thing they’d do is put in an emergency call for an airlift of a pint or so of Harper Rhys-Whitney’s blood to use as an antitoxin serum. Well, I already have more of Harper Rhys-Whitney’s blood than anybody else, so there’s no sense in my going to a hospital. I told you I’ve been bitten dozens of times before, Robby. I have resistance. If I was going to die, you’d have found my corpse over there in the bushes beside the two men. I’m having an allergic reaction to the venom, but it will pass. I’m not going to die, I promise you—but I am going to severely embarrass myself if you don’t let me out of this car so I can go to the bathroom.”