Neal Stephenson - Reamde

“Picked up a couple of strays,” Daniel joked, jerking a thumb toward the back. Olivia stood up, since the truck had come to a stop. Automatic lights had been triggered by the truck’s thermal signature and shone warm on her face. She was about to remind them of who she was when she heard Jake explain, “It’s Olivia.” Guessing, maybe, that John’s eyes were not good enough to recognize her in the sudden light. She found it odd that she was considered to be on a first-name basis with this family.

“Oh, hello again, Olivia!” John exclaimed. “Who is your friend?”

“That’s a long story—but he came here because he wanted to help Zula.”

“Then he’s a friend of ours,” Jake said. “Welcome to Prohibition Crick.”

Richard went to sleep with ease and then woke up a couple of hours later feeling bad that he had done so. After several days’ absence, the Furious Muses had hunted him down in this remote place and come after him with a vengeance. It made for a very crowded tent.

The jihadists might kill him in the morning. But it seemed unlikely. If that had been the agenda, they would have done it already and saved themselves all those zip ties.

If they weren’t going to kill him, then in the morning they would make him guide them up the old smugglers’ trail to Abandon Mountain and Prohibition Crick. In order for that to work, they’d have to remove the zip-tie hobbles. He would then have the option of trying to run away from them. It seemed likely that this would lead to pursuit, capture, and ceremonial decapitation.

So he was going to have to look for a place where he could get away from them suddenly, out of rifle shot range, in some manner that would make it difficult to track him.

A movie hero would have jumped off the cliff into American Falls yesterday. After a few tense moments, his head would have broken the surface of the river some distance downstream. Richard knew that this was not really a practical strategy. But there might be stretches of the river that he could conceivably use in a similar way, body-surfing through rapids.

The problem was that their route didn’t really follow this river. The river ran south and west. Their destination was more easterly, and so their plan today was to hike down the east bank for about a mile and then clamber up an endless slope until they broke out above the tree line and found themselves on a rocky spur thrown out from the mountain. From there they’d traverse a talus field that constituted the peak’s western slope and finally drop into the valley of Prohibition Crick. The only way Richard could make a quick getaway in that sort of country was to let gravity take him and skid or roll down a slope. Which might have been fun, or at least survivable, on a sand dune or a snowfield, but in this territory would just lead to slow death from broken bones and ruptured organs.

Still, he kept pondering it through the long hours of the night, since it was the only way to keep the F.M.s off his back. He readily agreed to their basic premise, which was that, since he was about to lead a band of heavily armed terrorists straight to the homestead where several of his close relatives were minding their own business, his own life was forfeit to begin with.

The obvious dodge was to lead them somewhere else instead. But there were limits to how far he could mislead them. Jones had quite obviously done his homework, interrogating Zula in considerable detail, poring over Richard’s Wikipedia article, printing out hard copies from Google Maps. He had a very clear idea of where they were going. As a matter of fact, Jones could easily find his way all the way to Pocatello from here with no help at all from Richard, which made Richard suspect that he was now being kept alive, not as a guide, but as a hostage and possible subject of a gruesome webcam execution. He could already picture the YouTube page, Dodge kneeling on a rug with a sack on his head, Jones behind him with the knife, and, underneath the little video pane, the first of many thousands of all-capital-letter comments sent in by all the world’s useless fuckwits.

No, at this point the only card he really had to play—the only way to help Jake and John and the others save themselves—was to warn them. Because until now Jones had shown no awareness whatsoever that the valley of Prohibition Crick was inhabited. He must have seen a few roofs peeking out of trees in the Google satellite photos, but he might have made the reasonable guess that these were just summer cabins for Spokane orthodontists, boarded up and quiet at this time of year. Even if he had known that people were living in them year-round, he couldn’t have guessed—could he?—that these were the most heavily armed civilians in the history of the world—gun nuts on a scale that made Pathans look like Quakers.

Even gun nuts could be taken in a surprise attack, but if Richard could somehow make them aware that they were in danger, then they would be able to give a very good account of themselves.

The plan he finally arrived at, then, just as the roof of his tent was beginning to shed a few stray photons into his wide-open eyes, was that he would proceed docilely until he was within audible gunshot range of Jake’s place, and then make a break for it. The jihadists would shoot at him, and probably hit him. But everyone in the valley would hear it.

And then all hell would break loose.

He actually dozed for a little while, maybe an hour or so, and woke up to see more light filtering through the tentcloth and to hear the hiss of a backpacking stove being lit up.

Something told him to get moving. He wriggled out of the sleeping bag, spun around on his butt, got his booted and hobbled feet out the door, and then inchwormed out onto the ground.

Only two of the nine jihadists were out here: the tall Somalian-Minnesotan named Erasto, and another guy whose name Richard could not seem to keep in his mind. An Egyptian with a dark, callused spot in the middle of his forehead, caused by contact with the ground during prayer. They were heating a pot of water, presumably to cook up some porridge. Richard waddled closer to the stove and held his zip-tied hands out near the pot to catch some of the warmth. Erasto was eating an energy bar, the Egyptian just staring off aimlessly into the distance.

Richard realized that he had to take a crap, and he had to take it now.

He stood up. Erasto watched him carefully. He looked over toward the crap-taking place, which was a hundred or so feet away at the base of the cliff they had yesterday descended with rope.

“You guys have any toilet paper?”

No response.

“Dude,” Richard said, “I really gotta go. No fooling.”

Erasto seemed incredulous-verging-on-disgusted that he was having to deal with such matters. “Jabari!” he said. This seemed to get the attention of the Egyptian. Richard seized on it as an opportunity to finally learn the guy’s name. Jabari. As in jabber. As in jabbing someone with a knife.

Erasto was asking some kind of question. Jabari bestirred himself and began to sort through a nearby pack, apparently looking for the bumwad supply.

Richard was hopping from foot to foot, as best he could when hobbled. It was very much open to question whether he was going to make it to a suitable place in time.

“I’m going to start hopping toward a suitable place to take a crap,” he announced. He was speaking as calmly as possible, since he didn’t want to shout and give non-English speakers such as Jabari the wrong idea. “You can follow me, you can shoot me in the back, whatever. But something’s got to give.” The sentence was punctuated with an impressive fart, which proved a much more effective communication than anything that had been escaping from Richard’s other end. Richard toddled around until his back was turned to Erasto and then began mincing across the campsite, moving away from the river and into the undergrowth that grew profusely between the bank and the base of the cliff. In about half a minute’s hopping, cursing, farting struggle through the shrubs—which grew densely here, watered by the mist drifting from the falls—he came to a clear place, dotted with turds and flecked with used bumwad, at the base of the cliff.