Neal Stephenson - Reamde

Which she had every intention of doing. Only about a quarter of the big can’s contents sufficed to fill the bottle. The rest was available for other purposes.

First she was careful to get the lid screwed firmly back onto the bottle and stow that in her pack. Then she fished out a couple of the matches she’d packed earlier and stuck them into her mouth. She stood up and hoisted the pack around onto her back. During all of these exertions, she had come upon an old flashlight with nearly dead batteries, so she set it on the floor, aimed toward the stairs, and left it turned on. That enabled her to turn off her own flashlight. Gas can in one hand, she ascended the stairs as quickly as she could without making a lot of noise. Being chased around the Schloss by Ershut would be bad, and being cornered in the basement would be worse, but being caught by him in midstairway was the worst she could think of.

She stopped at the top of the stairs, appalled for a moment by the unpleasant thought that Ershut might be right on the other side of the door, waiting for her. That was enough to make her reach up above her shoulder in an exploratory way and verify that the handle of the big butcher knife was in a place where she could grab it.

She waited there in the dark until she was certain she heard a boom from farther away in the Schloss: probably Ershut kicking open a door in one of the guest wings.

She pushed the door open and waited for some kind of disaster, or at least nearby movement; but the place was quiet except for the crunching boom of another door being kicked in.

She felt her way around two corners and entered the tavern. By the faint red glow of her flashlight shining through the flesh of her hand, she found her way through the dining area to the end of the room that was dominated by the bar and the TV and the plush sofas and chairs arranged before it. A nest of empty chip wrappers and soda cans told her where her uncle had been vegging out at the moment Jones had come to pay a call on him.

She hated to do it, for she knew how Uncle Richard loved this place. But the foam in this furniture would burn better than anything else, once it got going. She spilled a long trail of stove gas down the length of the sofa and across the laps of the adjoining chairs, then dumped what was left in a puddle on the floor.

Before lighting the match, she stepped over to a window that afforded a view to the north side of the property and verified her suspicion that Jahandar—or at least someone with a flashlight—was posted there, right in the middle of the road, at the place where it ramped down to the top of the dam.

Ershut was continuing to make his location obvious. He was nowhere near her.

She pulled a match from her mouth, lit it, and threw it. Too fast, for it missed the target and went out on the carpet. The second one caught and the flames spread with shocking effect, blinding her night-adjusted eyes. To Jahandar or anyone out on the road, it would be as bright as sunrise, even with the blinds drawn. It seemed inadvisable to emerge from a door anywhere near that, so she made her way round to the guest wing where Ershut did not seem to be. This was just a long straight hallway, aimed generally southward, lined with doors to guest rooms on both sides. Moving at the best jogging gait she could manage with the heavy pack on her back, she went straight to its end, punched out through the emergency exit there (fighting a ridiculous feeling of good-girl shame that it should never be used except in an actual emergency) and moved as directly as she could in the direction of the nearest cover: the edge of the forest along the banks of the Blue Fork, about a hundred feet away.

She was finding it surprisingly easy to see where she was going without benefit of flashlight and thought for a second that this was because of the fire light shining out from the tavern’s windows. Then she understood that the eastern sky was beginning to brighten. Whoever had written “the darkest hour is before the dawn” apparently had not spent much time in the Northwest, where, for hours before it actually breached the horizon, the sun scattered vague blue light off the underside of the cloud cover.

A bell started ringing. She wondered if she’d caused this to happen by using the emergency exit. But the power was off, so it couldn’t be that. The bell was not an electrical device. It sounded like an actual, physical piece of metal being struck by a flailing hammer. The sound was thready and faltering, as though whatever contraption drove it was already on its last legs. For all that, it carried clearly through the still air of the valley.

A stocky man—Ershut—was silhouetted against the glowing windows of the tavern as he ran in front of them. He had gone outdoors when he’d realized that the building was on fire. He was headed for the front, zeroing in, she guessed, on the source of the noise. She lost him in the darkness. Then she returned her gaze to the windows, noting a dramatic fall-off in the intensity of the light.

The sprinklers must have come on inside the tavern. They were rigged up to some kind of device on the front of the building: water rushing through the sprinkler pipes turned a little wheel that smacked the bell, sounding the alarm even when electrical power was shut off.

The big windows of the tavern began to explode: someone attacking them with a sledgehammer or a rifle butt, venting smoke. Dim flares of orange light shone through in places that weren’t covered by the spray patterns of the sprinkler system. A few minutes later Zula heard the roaring hiss of a fire extinguisher being operated in short bursts and saw those little fires being snuffed out one by one. The bell continued to sound even after the fire had been put out, and it would keep doing so until the system ran out of water or was shut off by operating a valve somewhere.

She had made these observations while moving furtively through the woods, favoring north-facing slopes so that she could get a view down over the Schloss. The sky was getting appreciably brighter. When she had arrived, she’d been able to see nothing except dim gleams of moonlight on roofs, and the pools of illumination cast by flashlights, but now she could see the entire compound, albeit in faint gray on gray, and she could see Ershut and Jahandar moving around even when they weren’t using their lights.

All of which worked to her advantage but told her that she had better move deeper into the woods before it became light enough to making tracking her easy.

She moved another hundred yards back, troubled by the amount of noise she made as she forced herself and the bulky pack through undergrowth. Then she turned back and looked again, since she had picked up bright lights in her peripheral vision.

A car was coming down the road, approaching the dam. She was thrilled to see it and then horrified by the certainty that whoever was inside it was about to be gunned down.

Instead, though, Jahandar approached, waving arms, bringing it to a stop at the far end of the dam. His rifle was slung on his shoulder. He bent down to engage the driver in conversation.

This must be the scrubs—the backup team. The day before yesterday, they must have driven the RV back to Elphinstone and parked it in a campground somewhere. When Zula had made her break, Jahandar or Ershut must have reached these people by phone or walkie-talkie or something, told them to come quick. The car’s rear doors opened up, and a man got out from each side, pulling a bag out behind him, slinging it over his back.

After a few minutes’ more conversation, the car went into movement again, pulling around in a U-turn, and headed back down the road toward Elphinstone.

She heard a pop behind her: the snap of a twig.

She turned around to see Sayed stealing up on her, about thirty feet away.