Philip Kerr - Esau

‘Fuck you, Boyd.’

‘Whatever you say, sweetheart.’

He wanted to have some fun before he killed her.

One of the job’s perks. There hadn’t been many of those. Fool around with her before he blew up the bird.

‘You know, that’s not a bad idea,’ he said and pointed the carbine squarely at her chest. ‘Why don’t you take that suit off? I’d like to see what you look like in your thermals.’

‘Go to hell, Boyd. Just kill me and get it over with, because I’m not about to play your—’

He fired a single shot above her head, so close that she felt it touch her hair.

‘I expect all you had in mind was that you should kill me,’ he said, ‘any way you could get a shot in. But there are lots of ways I can kill you, Swifty. Lots of slow ways. Apache style. Or you can hang on to life a while longer. Do what you’re told and stay alive. Maybe.’ His tone became more menacing. ‘Now get undressed or the next one will be in your kneecap.’

Swift remained motionless.

‘I can tell you’ve never seen anyone shot in the kneecap, Swifty. It hurts. Once I’ve shot you in the kneecap I can do what I want with you anyway. Makes no difference to me. What matters more is the difference it might make to you.’

He was right. While she was alive, she still had a ghost of a chance.

Resisting the temptation to tell him to go to hell. Swift unclipped the SCE control unit and tossed it to the ground. Then she turned her back on him, an idea already half-forming in her mind.

‘You’ll have to help me,’ she said. ‘It’s hard to get out of this thing by yourself.’

‘Okay,’ said Boyd. ‘But no tricks now.’ He placed the icy muzzle of the carbine under her ear. ‘Or I can promise you won’t hear my next word of reproach.’

She felt him unfasten the backpack life-support system.

‘Easy now,’ he said, unplugging her all-in-one underwear from its special little pipe.

Before she could do anything he stepped back.

‘Now climb out of the suit. Slowly.’

Swift did as she was told and then dropped the empty suit at her feet like a sloughed skin. She began to shiver, hardly sure whether it was from fear or from cold.

‘Now take the one-piece off.’

‘I always knew there was something fundamentally crummy about you, Boyd. Ever since that night in Khat, when you made that crude pass at me.’ She ripped open the Velcro strip covering her underwear’s zip fastener.

‘You should have been nice,’ he said. ‘Could be you’ll live to regret that you weren’t. But I’m not promising.’

‘I think rape is precisely your style.’

She peeled off her protective underwear and stood before him wearing only her bra and panties. After the warmth of the water-heated underwear, the cold took her breath away. Only one thing was sustaining Swift. The suits had one major design limitation: Virtually the only way to have a pee was to take it off or go in the suit. To rape her Boyd would surely have to remove his own suit. That might be her only opportunity.

‘Come on,’ he growled. ‘The rest of it.’

Swift unfastened her bra and threw it onto the ground. Quickly she stepped out of her panties and, shivering, endured his penetrating gaze. She was sure now: The cold definitely had the edge. But there were maybe worse ways to die than cold. Surely it would be like going to sleep.

‘Nice,’ said Boyd. ‘Very nice indeed. You and me are going to have a little party. Now get down on your hands and knees and start praying that this cold doesn’t affect me, or I’m likely to kill you out of sheer frustration.’

She did as she was told. But straight away her eyes searched the ground for the gun.

‘Do you always blame the cold for your obvious inadequacies?’ she said through chattering teeth.

Boyd moved around the back of her and chuckled.

‘Keep talking. In just a few moments your ass is going to start paying me back for some of those smart remarks, lady. The more you say now, the more it’s going to hurt. And you better understand something right now. Giving hurt is what I get off on. So talk all you like, Swifty. But just keep your eyes on the ground.’

‘What’s the matter? Shy or something? You’re forgetting. I’m an anthropologist. I’ve seen an ape’s dick before.’

She trembled with fear and cold as she heard something thrown on the ground. It was the control unit for his suit. Then her heart gave a leap. The gun. She could see her gun. It was lying on a clump of flowering white sandwort, no more than five or six metres from her right hand, and looking for all the world like a gift from the fairies.

Boyd was laughing.

‘That’s it. Keep your Bogart coming, Swifty. I’ll be ready to get you warm again in a tick.’

She heard him wrestling with his backpack life support. Taking it off by yourself was like trying to take off a straitjacket. You needed to be almost double-jointed. Virtually the only way she had found of doing it easily was to lie down on the ground and lean hard onto her elbow to force her hand back over her shoulder as far as it would go. It was a lot easier simply to have someone help you.

Boyd cursed out loud as he reached the same conclusion.

It was Swift’s cue to run.

She was running before she had time to have second thoughts about her chances of surviving at low temperatures without clothing. But she had managed to grab the gun.

Instinctively she started to zigzag.

A couple of seconds later the tree beside her was pitted with small explosions of wood and sap as Boyd started firing from the hip.

She felt the freezing cold breeze on her bare breasts and limbs as, her heart thumping, she hurdled a fallen tree trunk and then took off at another tangent, sprinting through the trees. While she was running, it didn’t feel too cold. It was when she stopped that her problems would begin. Missing her footing she slipped, somersaulted, and like an expert marksman, stood up returning fire in the direction she had come from. The gun hardly flinched as it set about its task, for it seemed to Swift that she had very little to do except point the thing, and although she was hardly aware of pulling the trigger once, she fired eight shots in less time than it would have taken her to play a piano scale.

Expecting a volley of bullets to come after her, she took off again, ducking under branches, sidestepping trees, and all the time aware of the sulphurous smell of cordite, as if the air itself had been galvanized by the gunfire. The next second she was lying on her back, hearing another shot, and thinking she must have been hit until she looked above her ringing head and saw the branch of a tree sticking out like a tollgate. In her desperation to escape from Boyd she had run headfirst into the outstretched arm of the forest’s own Checkpoint Charlie.

She sat up and touched her head instinctively and found a Koh-i-noor-sized bump and a small trickle of blood. But recognizing the strong stink of the vegetation around her, she saw her little tunnel of rhododendrons and fallen trees again and quickly crawled inside.

Man’s oldest sanctuaries were natural woods. Hidden in the tunnel and lying on a bed of ferns. Swift felt safe enough to draw an ice-cold breath and lie in wait for him. She touched the bump on her head again and winced. Sanctuary had never felt so tender, or so bitterly cold. How long could she survive with only a bed of ferns to cover her naked body? Perhaps an hour or two at the most. Unless Boyd came looking for her, she was going to have to go looking for him or her clothes — or die of cold.

‘Come on, you bastard,’ she said, holding the gun at arm’s length along the ground in front of her.

Only the gun looked different now. The slide looked as if it had stuck, leaving the short barrel sticking out like a cigar’s end.