The Fear in Yesterday's Rings

by George C. Chesbro

  As Mabel lifted her trunk and trumpeted, I sprang away from her great bulk, crouched down in the lobox’s path, and began to swing the sticks.

  I knew I was in trouble. With the male, as big as it was, I’d had time to work on its mind, to hurt it, to at least make it hesitate in its dealings with me. The female coming at me, although smaller, was even more deadly. To her, I was just a piece of meat to be torn apart, and nothing short of a crippling blow to break one of her legs, or a killing blow to her head, was going to stop her; she might be able to make any number of passes at me, but if I failed just once to steer clear of her fangs and claws, I was dead.

  I was awash in an ocean of sound as Mabel continued to trumpet her distress, stomp her feet, and move her great bulk dangerously close to me. The lobox was still fifteen yards away when it suddenly screamed and prepared to spring. I whipped my sticks around and was just about to jump to my left when an enormous, tawny shape flew past my head, so close to my right ear that I could feel the wind of its passing against my cheek.

  The male collided with the female in midair, virtually in front of my face. The male’s weight straightened the female up, knocked her backward. When they landed, he was on top of her, growling, his fangs poised over her throat, one hind leg raised, extended claws hovering over her exposed belly.

  The female’s reaction was instantaneous. She immediately arched her head back, exposing her throat, and all four of her legs were raised, stiff, in the air.

  Submission.

  It was all over in a matter of seconds. The male accepted the female’s submission, backed off her as it growled and bared its fangs. I turned around and ran back to Mabel, who had quieted down somewhat, and again took up my refuge behind her left front leg. When I looked back, I was alarmed to see Luther taking aim with his Smith & Wesson at the male lobox. The male cringed, flattening its ears against its head, and turned away—but stood its ground, certainly knowing that it now faced its own death.

  “Shoot it and the lobox becomes extinct again!” I shouted, wondering why I seemed to care so much. “That’s your last fertile male! Kill it, and everything you and your father have done will be for nothing!”

  Luther hesitated, then swung the 30–06 in my direction. His face had gone white. “You interfering little bastard! You’ve ruined everything! I’ll see you dead!”

  He set the rifle on the ground, drew the Magnum. Holding it with both hands, he moved toward Mabel, who moved back a step, almost knocking me off balance. Luther then began to circle to his right in an effort to get a shot at me. It was precisely what I’d been hoping for, because his route took him close to the silo. Garth and Harper were ready. As Luther moved beneath the vent, they cast the rope and burlap net we had constructed to trap the lobox. The net floated down through the air, fell over Luther’s head and shoulders.

  Luther clawed at the net with the barrel of the Magnum and his free hand, but I was already sprinting toward him, nunchaku sticks swinging.

  The female lobox beat me to him. Primed to kill, her bloodlust fanned by her failure to kill me, frustrated by the male’s dominance, she now sensed her master’s helplessness, and her instinct told her to kill. Unrestrained now by the male, she leaped at the hapless figure struggling in the netting; her jaws were open, her hind legs curled up beneath her, claws extended to disembowel. Luther’s scream was cut off, abbreviated by death, as the creature’s jaws closed over his throat and the claws tore into him, opening him up, spilling the contents of his stomach onto the ground.

  Above me, Harper screamed at the sight of the female lobox shoving her maw into Luther’s body, tearing at his flesh. I certainly no longer cared to go in that direction, and I came to a screeching halt. The Magnum had fallen next to Luther’s body, and I wasn’t going to contest the lobox for it; I retreated, slung the nunchaku sticks around my neck, stooped down and picked up the Smith & Wesson off the ground. I smacked the clip to make sure it was in place, then swung the rifle around and leveled it on the female. My finger tightened on the trigger, but I didn’t fire.

  Although I was clearly aiming at the female, who had stopped chomping on Luther and was now standing stiff-legged and staring at me, the male lobox was also reacting strongly to the sight of me with a gun in my hands. There was a look in its eyes that was almost—accusatory. In fact, I didn’t really want to kill the female—and I wondered what would happen to my relationship with the male if I did.

  Animals aren’t people, I reminded myself. Indeed, people were probably the lobox’s natural prey, which made it the most dangerous creature—next to people—on the face of the planet. The female was primed to kill me, and I couldn’t afford to play games with her. And yet …

  “Shoot them, Robby!” Harper called in a high-pitched voice laced with tension and fear. “Shoot them both while you can! Don’t take any chances!”

  What the hell, I thought as I slowly lowered the heavy rifle and backed away, keeping my gaze on the female, my main concern. In for a penny, in for a pound. Killing things was easy. Although the female was a hybrid, there was no telling how many generations of wolf-kuvasz breeding she represented. She too was a precious thing on a world that was exterminating species of living things at the rate of hundreds a year.

  I kept backing away, moving toward the truck. When I was fifty yards away, I rested the rifle in the crook of my left arm, took my nunchaku sticks from around my neck.

  The female started to move toward me, but the male immediately blocked her way, bared its fangs, and growled.

  “That’s good,” I said evenly, talking directly to the male, straggling to keep my voice steady. I slowly bent down, laid aside the Smith & Wesson. “If you want your girlfriend to live, you’re going to need all your smarts, and then some. It’s up to you.”

  “Hey, Mongo!” Garth called. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? Stop farting around! Pick up the fucking gun and shoot them!”

  I clicked the nunchaku sticks together, and the male’s ears pricked up. I signaled with the sticks, pointing them toward the open doors at the rear of the truck.

  “Here,” I continued, rapping the side of one of the open doors with a stick. “Pay attention. If you want her to live, put her in here.”

  I rapped the door again, harder, then moved away from the truck.

  It wasn’t until I was better than ten yards away that I realized I had neglected to bring the rifle along with me. This did not escape the female’s attention. She had no reason whatsoever to fear me or the nunchaku sticks, and she abruptly leaped forward to attack. I crouched and readied my sticks, but it wasn’t necessary. The male surged forward, easily overtook her, headed her off. She veered off and spun around, snarled, and he bit her hard on the left flank. She screamed in pain, her bloodlust instantly dampened, then immediately tried to stand on her head before rolling over and adopting the now-familiar posture of a submitting lobox. The male nudged her from behind, got her to her feet, and started moving her forward, gently nipping her from behind—heading her toward the track, almost as if he had understood my every word. She veered away; he again headed her off, turned her around, headed her toward the truck.

  I draped my sticks around my neck and watched in amazement as the male, working the female as if he were a champion sheepdog, kept herding her toward the semi. He kept at it, nipping her first on one flank and then the other, moving her closer and closer. One last good nip on the hindquarters sent her hurtling through the air, through the open doors, into her cage in the truck.

  I sprinted to the truck, virtually shoving the huge male out of my way, and slammed the doors shut, locked them in place. Gasping for breath, winded as much from tension as from physical exertion, I scowled at the creature whose face was now only inches from mine.

  “Sit.”

  It sat. Then, without really giving a lot of thought to what I was doing, I reached out and patted it on the head, then began to scratch it under its chin.

  “Good b—”

 
The lobox’s reaction was instantaneous. It uttered a sound from somewhere deep in its chest, something between a bark and a growl, then abruptly surged forward, butting me in the chest with its head and knocking me down onto my back. It was instantly on me, its huge forelegs straddling my shoulders, its barrel chest bearing down on my chest and pinning me helplessly to the ground. Its golden eyes stared into mine, and I tensed, waiting for the surge of a clawed hind foot that would tear away the lower half of my body, or the snap of jaws that would remove my face and throat.

  It made a soft growling sound, then proceeded to lick my face with a long, red washcloth of a tongue that was at once slimy and rough, like a cow’s.

  I had offered it a sign of affection, and now the damn thing wanted to play.

  Well, this just wasn’t the time for the leader of the pack to play, but the problem was finding a way of communicating this fact to the huge creature that was pressing down on my chest.

  The first trick was to pull my right arm free from where it was pinned next to my body by one of the lobox’s legs. My nunchaku sticks were within reach, but I didn’t want to hurt the animal now—just get its attention, get it off me, and then get it to do the next thing I wanted it to do. I made what I hoped was an appropriately menacing growling noise, then whacked it across its wide, wet muzzle with the flat of my hand.

  “Get the fuck off me!” I snapped, and whacked it again. “Work now, play later.”

  The lobox whined, then backed off me and stood at my feet with its head bowed, looking amazingly reproached.

  I stood up, wiped saliva off my face, then picked up the nunchaku sticks and clicked them together. “School’s not out yet, pal. Pay attention.”

  At once, the animal raised its head, pricked up its ears. I walked over to the open doors in the center of the side of the truck. I beat a tattoo on the inside of one with my sticks, then started walking toward the silo. The lobox dutifully trotted along beside me, its tongue lolling out. We reached the silo and I looked up at the vent, where Garth and Harper were standing at the edge, staring down at me. Garth was grinning and shaking his head as if in disbelief. He gave me a thumbs-up sign, which I returned. Then I loosened the chain holding the doors shut, pushed one open slightly, motioned the lobox in.

  From inside the silo came a cacophony of sound—barks, yelps, roars, lobox screams, and generalized bustling about. About a minute later the two females came scampering out of the silo, virtually under the startled Mabel’s trunk, with the male right on their heels. There was much chasing around, with the male doing his sheepdog number, nipping at the females’ flanks, and once the three of them disappeared around the other end of the silo. But then they were back, with the male herding them. I walked back to the truck, waited. It took the male another five minutes but he finally managed to get them both to leap, almost simultaneously, into the truck. I grunted with satisfaction, slammed the doors shut behind them.

  “Now sit,” I said to the lobox, pointing with a stick toward its flank. It sat. I unhesitatingly put my hand on its head, scratched it behind the ears. “The Road Runner’s very proud of you, Coyote.”

  I looked up in time to see Garth and Harper emerge from the silo. Garth, ambling along with his hands in his pockets, was still grinning and shaking his head. Harper broke into a run. She came up to me, brushing right past the sitting lobox, threw her arms around my neck, and hugged me.

  “Robby,” she breathed in her huskiest, sexiest voice, “that’s the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen. I love you!”

  “Not too trashy a show, Mongo,” Garth said to me as he came up and laid his thick right arm across my shoulder. “I’d have actually paid to see that.”

  “Thanks, brother. I realize that’s your highest compliment.”

  Garth grunted. “That truck has a CB antenna, so it must have a radio. Let me see if I can’t rustle up some help.”

  I said, “Tell whoever you get hold of to bring food. I don’t know about you people, but I’m hungry.”

  Garth climbed up into the cab of the truck, closed the door. Harper and I simply held each other, gazed into each other’s eyes, and I knew I was most definitely, hopelessly, in love.

  “Help’s on the way,” Garth announced, climbing back down from the cab. “And food. Heroes and coffee for us, a hundred pounds of horsemeat and a ton of hay for our entourage.”

  I nodded. “That sounds like about the right take-out order to me.”

  “I charged it all to your personal Amex card, brother,” Garth said with a grin.

  “Thanks a lot, Garth. What’s the going rate for horsemeat and hay?”

  “Beats me. I expect it’s the handling and transportation charges that are going to be expensive. I thought it would be a good lesson to you. Just because you keep getting yourself involved in strange business like this, there’s no reason why the company should have to pay for it. This way, it will save us the trouble of trying to explain expenses for hay and horsemeat to our accountants and the IRS.”

  “Oh, yeah. Good thinking, Garth.”

  Harper nodded toward Mabel, who was off to one side of the silo nuzzling her trunk in a patch of grass, then placed her hand next to mine on the lobox’s head. “Now we really need a circus.”

  Garth said, “I don’t think it’s going to be all that difficult to find one for sale.”

  Epilogue

  Ah, yes. The usual congressional committees had announced the usual hearings, and they were all planning to round up and grill the usual suspect: the CIA. The thinking was that this time that venerable agency, indomitable defender of individual liberties, might even have been collaborating with the KGB—or some Eastern bloc country whose leaders were now more worried about insane mullahs, renegade Arabs, and Israelis than they were about the traditional ideological conflicts of East versus West. Such were the fruits of glasnost and perestroika, as harvested by the ever-fumbling intelligence communities. Three committee chairmen had even had the remarkable good sense to inquire about the possibility of having Frederickson and Frederickson assist in their investigation. Garth and I had told them we’d think about it. Personally, I didn’t think they were going to get very far.

  “I always said you had a mystical way with animals,” Harper said as she wrapped her arms around my waist and kissed my neck—to the hearty applause of the huge crowd jammed inside the Big Top of the Statler Brothers Circus.

  I flushed, thoroughly embarrassed, and raised my arms to acknowledge the cheers of the crowd—as if being kissed on the neck by a beautiful woman while riding on the back of a monstrous elephant was an astonishing trick.

  “There was nothing mystical about it, my dear,” I replied, leaning back slightly so that she could hear me above the roar of the crowd. “Loboxes are smart. They learn quickly. But they aren’t people; they interpret things in an animal way. I’ve explained it all to you. Their first attack on us was a failure—”

  “Thanks to you,” Harper said, and I felt her shudder. “If you hadn’t pulled me back, it would only have been half a failure.”

  “Whatever. It couldn’t get us, I shot it, you killed his buddy, I challenged him for territory, and then made it stick by whacking him around. Also, it could see that I controlled Mabel, an animal that was much bigger and more powerful than he was. He probably also thought I controlled you, which is a howler. Anyway, lobox logic dictated that it should stop screwing around with me. That was all there was to it.”

  Harper giggled. “Then it certainly doesn’t appreciate the full range of your many talents. I love to screw around with you.”

  “Harper, this isn’t the time or place to talk dirty.”

  “Like I said, Robby,” Harper persisted in her husky voice, “you have a mystical way with animals. And it’s not only with Mabel and Coyote. You make me feel like an animal … and there’s no question that you put me in heat.”

  “Now you’ve done it. You’ve given me a hard-on in front of a few thousand people.”

  �
�I’ll tend to it later.”

  Mabel had reached the enlarged VIP box and was going into one of her patented, dainty pachyderm pirouettes. Below us, the occupants of the box cheered, grinned, and clapped wildly. Phil Statler, stockholder and managing director for life of the circus that once again bore his name, looked at least fifteen years younger than when I had seen him lying close to death in Bellevue Medical Center. Garth and Mary sat on either side of him, and in the rows behind them sat the dozen or so freaks who, with Garth, Harper, and me, were also shareholders in the circus. Everyone looked most pleased on the occasion of this, the grand reopening of Statler Brothers Circus.

  And well they might. There had originally been a matinee and an evening performance scheduled for the opening day. Then the state troopers had called at eleven o’clock in the morning to tell us the roads were jammed with cars and that people were coming from all over the region to see us. Phil had hastily scheduled an extra late afternoon performance and was even thinking about adding a midnight show to accommodate the tens of thousands of people parked in cars, vans, and campers all over the local county fairgrounds.

  Garth had been promised that he could ride the elephant in the midnight show.

  But, of course, it wasn’t the elephant, or the circus, the people were coming to see. They were coming to see the “werewolf”—or, as Phil’s ads put it, the EIGHTH WONDER OF THE WORLD, BROUGHT BACK THROUGH THE CLOUDY MISTS OF PREHISTORIC TIME BY MAD SCIENTISTS.

  Now, that was a draw. Already, the big indoor arenas from coast to coast, and in Europe, were offering exorbitant financial guarantees if the Statler Brothers Circus, with its strange creature, could be booked sometime before the close of the century. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to see a lobox.

  For a time there had been considerable pressure from some quarters, understandably, to kill Coyote—the name Harper and I had decided on for the lobox, for no other reason than the fact that it made us smite—and all the female hybrids and younger breeding stock, to destroy them all as killers and menaces, but cooler heads had prevailed. It had been patiently pointed out that a lobox could not be held responsible for its natural instincts, any more than a leopard, tiger, or other wild beast. The evil existed in the men who had exploited those instincts to murder other men. Loboxes were killers, yes, but they weren’t murderers. In any case, there was a very real chance that the lobox would once again become extinct if Coyote died before a solution could be found to the genetic problem that had doomed it to extinction in the first place. Somehow, Coyote had to keep making babies with the hybrids, and a way had to be found to diversify the gene pool of the offspring.