Philip Kerr - Esau

It took a moment or two for the meaning of the gun’s shape to pierce the shivering euphoria she felt at having escaped. The realization that she was out of ammunition chilled her to the bone. She was waiting to ambush a man with an empty gun. She must have emptied the whole magazine when she fell and returned fire.

‘Shit.’

Swift gouged the gun into the ground in sheer frustration and tried to think what to do next. Lie there and quickly freeze to death. Or surrender and hope that after he had used her he might let her live.

‘Fat chance of that,’ she muttered, and closed her eyes. The starkness of the choice facing her was followed by the perception that it would all be ended soon.

Advancing through the forest, Boyd tried to guess how many shots she had fired.

Upon leaving ABC he had handed Ang Tsering the.38-calibre Beretta he had used to kill Miles Jameson. The automatic had a double-action magazine containing ten rounds. Swift had fired another eight shots. So the question was, how many shots had Tsering fired before giving up his weapon, if any? He had to assume that she still had two shots at the most. Enough to make the hunt interesting. He hoped he would find her in time before she froze to death. Her body would be no good to him then.

His keen and experienced eyes soon picked out her trail. The occasional footprint in the snow. And the little pile of empty brass, like the droppings of some metallic animal, where she had stopped to fire back at him. Kneeling down, he collected the empty cases to make sure. Eight. If she had fired eight she might have fired her whole magazine out of plain fear. She was probably staring at an empty gun right now. She was probably near enough to hear him.

He stood up again, startling a pale-grey-and-white bird with a black head, which flew away with a loud flapping of wings. The noise almost cost him another bullet. It was just a snow pigeon.

‘I know you’re somewhere,’ he shouted. ‘Why don’t you come out and we can get it over with? If I have to come and find you, it’s going to be hard on your body. You hear me?’

He paused, ears straining for a reply, but there was only silence. Patiently, Boyd stood stock-still, as if he knew that something would soon give her away. He did not have to wait long.

Another bird, only this time running across the ground from a dense clump of trees and bushes, coming toward him, racing to escape someone else, and veering away from Boyd at the last moment.

Boyd frowned as he watched the bushes carefully. Scanning the dark green foliage, it seemed that there was something lying on the ground beyond the leaves. Something human. He couldn’t be sure. It had started to snow. Each flake brushed each leaf and made it move so that...

A hand. He could see her hand. Grinning he moved closer, and tightening his grip on the carbine, he raised it to shoulder level.

‘I can see you,’ he said teasingly. ‘Hiding in there. You insult my intelligence, Swifty. I could shoot you from here, no problem. Now throw out your gun and let’s see the rest of you. If I see anything other than your tits pointing at me, I’ll—’

Suddenly there was an explosion of sound and vegetation as if some kind of mortar bomb had landed in front of him. Before he had time even to think or to squeeze the trigger, something huge bulldozed its way through the foliage toward him, roaring like a hurricane. Trees and bushes were literally flattened as if another out-of-control satellite were crashing to Earth.

Boyd was so surprised that he turned and fled, his nerve completely gone. It was an impulse that automatically invited a chase, although not a protracted one. He hadn’t gone more than two or three metres when the huge silverback yeti knocked him down, tearing at his clothing, biting his neck and back.

Boyd began to scream.

Watching the yeti attack from the comparative safety of her rhododendron tunnel. Swift had a sudden and horrific insight into the power and ferocity of the creature she had come to protect. The yeti male was enormous, much larger than she had expected. Rebecca had been a third of the size of this monster — Madonna compared to Schwarzenegger.

The yeti yanked Boyd off the ground and, still holding him by one arm, stamped him down again.

Boyd screamed again as his arm was torn from his body at the shoulder. Swift might have been glad. Instead she felt sorry for him.

Distracted by the sight of blood, the yeti sucked at the fragmented end of Boyd’s arm. Mortally injured, Boyd feebly turned on his belly and tried to crawl away. He managed only half a metre before, with a terrible roar, the yeti fell upon him again. It picked Boyd up like an item of hand luggage, held him high above its head as if it were about to stow him somewhere, and then threw him to the ground, stamping on his torso a second time.

The yeti sat down, grunting loudly. It regarded Boyd with vague disinterest for a moment, then picked him up a third time. But instead of throwing him down again, this time the yeti brought Boyd’s torn and bloody stump of a shoulder up to its huge jaws and jerked its head away, tugging at the flesh of the man’s bare breast. Boyd was still alive, feebly trying to push the yeti’s big head away even as he was being eaten.

Watching with horror. Swift found herself gagging.

‘Jesus Christ,’ she said and covered her face.

When she looked up again, she saw that the yeti had cast Boyd aside and that he had stopped moving. Relief quickly gave way to terror as she realized that the yeti’s big yellowish eyes were now fixed squarely on her.

Swift remained quite still. There was no point in running. Boyd had proved that. The big silverback yeti had moved with a speed that she found astonishing for so large a creature. She estimated it to be almost two and a half metres tall and as heavy as two hundred and seventy kilogrammes. Attacking Boyd, it had moved like a gold medal Olympic sprinter, flying out of his starting blocks. What was more it had moved bipedally, on legs as big as tree trunks, powering itself forward with arms so hugely muscled they would have made even the largest bodybuilder look puny. Roaring like a tiger and with hair trailing in matted red pennants, the yeti looked as formidable a hominoid as perhaps the earth had ever seen.

She didn’t doubt that the slightest movement would cause the yeti to attack her. The hair on its headcrest was fully erect and the teeth fully exposed. Numb with cold as she was. Swift wondered how long she could force herself to lie there before severe chill turned to frostbite and exposure. Already her fingers and toes were without feeling and it was only the sight of the anomalously even number of fingers on Boyd’s severed hand that stopped her from crying out loud with terror and discomfort.

The yeti sat down and faced her, feeding on Boyd’s arm, occasionally glancing over its Rushmore-sized shoulders, as if waiting for the rest of the group of which. Swift was quite certain, it must surely have been leader.

But it was not the rest of the group that came.

The yeti stood up and to Swift’s surprise she heard human speech. Someone was there with her, in the hidden valley. Someone who seemed to be talking to the yeti. She knew the sound of Nepali well enough to recognize that this was some other language. But it did not seem to be any of the dialects spoken by the Sherpas. And she was quite sure that this was not someone from ABC who was speaking.

For a second she remembered Rebecca’s imitative abilities, wondered if this might not be actual yeti speech, and almost immediately rejected this: The blood to her brain must be freezing.